North Star

NORTH STAR

Building Belgium's AI & Robotics Future

Events

Hackathons & meetups

Education

Workshops & lectures

Engineering

Projects & products

Ecosystem

Partners & connections

Our events

Mar 2025
Past

AI Hackathon I

Our first AI hackathon bringing builders together for rapid prototyping.

ORGANIZED
May 2025
Past

AI Hackathon II

Second edition with stronger projects, demos, and team momentum.

ORGANIZED
Jun 2025
Past

SIGNAL I

Our first SIGNAL meetup focused on practical lessons from real builders.

ORGANIZED
Jun 2025
Past

Robotics Hackathon I

Hands-on robotics weekend focused on building and shipping working systems.

ORGANIZED
Aug 2025
Past

SIGNAL II

Second SIGNAL gathering for founders, engineers, and researchers.

ORGANIZED
Aug 2025
Past

AI Hackathon III

Third AI hackathon with stronger multi-agent and product-focused builds.

ORGANIZED
Sep 2025
Past

BruCon Security Conference

Belgium's premier security conference where we contributed with the North Star team.

CONTRIBUTED
Oct 2025
Past

Kids AI Vibecoding Hackathon

Youth-focused AI coding day introducing kids to building with AI tools.

ORGANIZED
Oct 2025
Past

Future In Bloom Pt. I

Embodied AI coworking and build sessions pushing practical robotics work forward.

ORGANIZED
Nov 2025
Past

Tectonic

Major Belgian tech conference where we contributed to ecosystem-level programming.

CONTRIBUTED
Nov 2025
Past

27th Belgium NLP Meetup

AI and multi-agent systems meetup centered on production-ready systems and real-world demos.

ORGANIZED
Nov 2025
Past

Agentic Payments Hackathon with Stripe

A payments-focused build weekend for agentic checkout and automation experiments.

ORGANIZED
Nov 2025
Past

Get Sip Done: Antwerp Kick-Off

A founder breakfast connecting Antwerp builders, operators, and investors.

ORGANIZED
Dec 2025
Past

ElevenLabs Worldwide Hackathon (Community Edition)

A community edition of the ElevenLabs global hackathon with voice AI builders in Ghent.

ORGANIZED
Jan 2026
Past

SIGNAL III

Flagship SIGNAL meetup featuring high-signal talks and demos.

ORGANIZED
Feb 2026
Past

University Robotics Workshop

Hands-on SO-101 robotics workshop at AP Hogeschool Antwerpen covering the LeRobot ecosystem, VLAs, and imitation learning workflows.

ORGANIZED
Feb 2026
Past

OpenClaw Deep Dive

An open evening for builders in collaboration with ICP Belgium, featuring a talk and live stations on OpenClaw AI agents.

CONTRIBUTED
Feb 2026
Past

AI Community Journal Club #001

A recurring paper-reading evening by AI Belgium and North Star.

ORGANIZED
Flagship Initiatives

The Vessel

An atelier for intelligent machines

Visit
Supported by

etoile

Community management and event platform

Explore

Stories

Filip Nowak · December 31, 2025 · 7 min read

The Cost of Connection

Brain drain breaks the chain of people lifting other people up. How do we ignite Belgium's tech ecosystem?

Read

We ♥

Port of Antwerp-Bruges Brucon Autodiscovery

Our friends

Hugging Face ElevenLabs Lovable European AI Office LeRobot Karel de Grote Hogeschool iMagineLab Nerdlab Dwengo Brubotics WeSTEM Tectonic Campus 19 E6K Creative STEM WAT Young Engineers La Grand Poste Wintercircus The Beacon AP Hogeschool

Let's build it together