It started with a conversation
Fiore Fraquelli came into contact with the Cronos Group through Sinc, an Antwerp student organisation built entirely around entrepreneurship: get students to take ownership, to start things, to run their own show. More or less the Cronos value system in student form. So the introduction was natural enough.
What happened next was less natural.
"I started with a conversation with Wim Tobback," Fiore says. "And I told him: I'd like to start something commercial from zero, but I don't know where, and I'm not technical. I just want a clean slate, marketing, sales, everything from the ground up, so I can build a brand out of it and end up sitting at the table with clients."
That is, by his own admission, an absurd thing for a student to say out loud. "But it's something unique about Cronos. If there's anywhere that could work, it's here."
It did work. A few ideas came and went. Then one stuck: the AI hype was rising, everyone could feel it, and there was room for a virtual brand, something that didn't need a delivery machine behind it yet, but did need a strong story. Fiore was paired with Danny Buls and told, essentially, to go figure it out. "Build the website yourself. Pick two colours, pick a logo, just make a brand. And work out how it's going to run internally and externally."
There was remarkably little steering. What there was instead were introductions, weeks and months of meeting people across the group, until the shape of the initiative emerged from the network rather than from a brief.
Learning the market from 30,000 feet
Before Baboon Labs existed, Fiore spent two to three years inside Cronos AI, a community play, deliberately high-level. The job was to know what every company in the group was working on, know what the market wanted, and put the two at the same table. For someone without a technical background it was an unusually good education: hundreds of use cases passing by, dozens of client conversations about what AI could actually do. But the role had a frustration built into it. "You bring them into contact, and then they go on together. You lose touch a bit."
He also watched the hype curve move in real time. The first peak, everyone wants to do AI, flattened fast, because companies got up to speed themselves. "The keynote we gave at the start, this is AI, here's what you can do with it, simply stopped landing."
Then a second wave arrived: AI in software development. "That landed really well again. When you saw those first Lovable demos, every enterprise fell off their chair. You write two sentences and code comes out."
At some point, hearing the same pain points on repeat, you stop brokering other people's solutions and start wanting one of your own.
The idea, and the pivot that made it work
The original thesis was aimed at the business, not at IT. Enterprise IT is busy keeping the core running, the ERP, the systems every critical process depends on. The small HR app, the sales tool, the finance automation never make it up the priority list.
"The idea was that we'd have an offering where we barely touch IT," Fiore explains. "Just a double-check, are we allowed to do all this?, but otherwise we could build for the business, fast."
The story sold. It just sold to the wrong room. Because the Cronos client base sits mainly inside IT, validation happened with IT managers and CIOs, and they kept handing the same answer back.Yes, that problem is real. But for us it lives in the analysis phase.
That phase, the gap between the business having an idea and IT having to build it, turned out to be where the frustration was stacked on both sides. The business thinks it's easy: I already built it myself in Lovable. IT thinks: you asked me for exactly this type of application, I built it, and it's still never right.
"They simply don't understand each other today."
Baboon Labs also refused a debate it was never going to win, whether AI-generated prototypes were production-worthy. At the time, honestly, they weren't. "That code, fine, it doesn't matter. The point is that you can see the concept, and that you can move forward with it."
That reframing is the whole company.
What Baboon Labs does today
Start from prototyping. Run fast iterations at the very front of the cycle, ideation, analysis, discovery, so every stakeholder looks at the same thing and signs off on the same thing, long before a developer opens an editor.
Around that sits the AI layer: transcription on stakeholder conversations, custom agents pulling context out of existing documentation, legacy codebases and development tickets. "Everywhere the chaos sits, where an analyst has to keep walking around checking whether what everyone says actually adds up, that's where we use AI to create structure. And pour it straight into a prototype."
Commercially that lands as two offerings. The first is doing the analysis themselves: a sprint zero, the sprint before the first real development sprint, where a mess of opinions and artefacts becomes something a developer can build with confidence, knowing not just what to build, but that it's the right thing. The second is teaching it: workshops and adoption sprints that get analysts inside large organisations working this way themselves. Both run in greenfield contexts and, increasingly, in legacy ones, where the analysis is technical and the question is simply what is this system actually doing?
Proof
Baloise
A large organisation with roughly a hundred analytical and functional profiles, investing seriously in getting its people onto the digital and AI train. Baboon Labs ran a crash course on what AI can do inside their domain, then a workshop and hackathon across two domains, built not on toy examples but on real items pulled from Baloise's own analysis backlog. The results came back strongly positive.
Story Machine
Two startup founders building a marketing platform, without the technical depth to specify it. They had around twenty features in their heads and no way to explain them to someone who didn't already share the picture. Baboon Labs ran a sprint zero: prototype iterations and workshops that turned the idea into requirements and a first working prototype. The visual did the arguing. They started seeing it themselves: "Oh, I thought that feature was a good idea, but now I see it on screen and it's worth nothing." Other features only appeared because two existing ones ended up side by side on a screen.
The duo
Fiore didn't stay solo for long. "It became clear very quickly, logically, that you need real expertise to actually do something. A sales story alone isn't enough."
He was looking for a killer product developer, someone who could build fast. By coincidence, Nikolai Nossulenko was doing his own rounds through the Cronos Group at exactly that moment. Wim Tobback made the connection.
"It grew very organically. We had a few conversations, it clicked, and we saw very quickly that we're highly complementary." Which is, as Fiore puts it, usually the secret of a good founding duo.
The company was formally incorporated in January, after a trial period that started the previous September. Just under a year in, Baboon Labs is no longer a virtual brand with a good story. It's a company with an offering, a client list, and a very specific answer to a question most of the market is still arguing about.