Walter De Brouwer


Walter De Brouwer is a Belgian-born Internet and technology entrepreneur and semiotician. He is a cofounder and CEO of doc.ai and former CEO of Scanadu in Mountain View, California.

Life

De Brouwer was born in Aalst, Belgium. He earned a Masters degree in linguistics from the University of Ghent and a PhD in Semiotics from Tilburg University. He was a lecturer at the University of Antwerp and adjunct professor at the International University of Monaco from 2001-2004. He is an Entrepreneur in Residence with the Centre for Entrepreneurial Learning at Judge Business School at the University of Cambridge since 2004. He sits on the editorial advisory board of the Journal for Chinese Entrepreneurship. De Brouwer is a member of the American Mathematical Society.

Publisher

De Brouwer set up Riverland Publications in 1990 to publish personal computer magazines. In 1994, he sold his titles to VNU. He then published the cyberpunk magazine Wave, edited by Michel Bauwens and designed by Niels Shoe Meulman. Wave was a cult Belgian avant garde magazine.

Internet

In 1996, De Brouwer was one of the founders of PING, later sold to EUnet. In 1999, sold his employment site, Jobscape In 2008, De Brouwer set up OLPC Europe, the European branch of One Laptop per Child.

Research labs

In 1996, De Brouwer founded Starlab together with MIT Media Lab founder Nicholas Negroponte and coordinated its research activities under the acronym BANG, a system later adopted by MIT in 2002.
De Brouwer serves as a board director of the Tau Zero Foundation.

Doc.ai

De Brouwer co-founded doc.ai, a company focused on decentralizing precision medicine with artificial intelligence.

Scanadu

De Brouwer is former co-founder and the CEO of Scanadu, a company located at the NASA Ames Research Park in California. and Scanaflo, an at-home, full-panel urinalysis testing device designed to give consumers immediate information about their liver health, urinary tract infections, and other vitals.
De Brouwer stepped down from CEO in April 2016 and became the CEO and co-founder of artificial intelligence start-up doc.ai. He also sits on the scientific advisory board of uBiome.

Other activities

De Brouwer is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts and served as President of RSA Europe from 2006 to 2008. He is a member of TED and curator of TEDxBrussels. He was a distinguished lecturer at the National Science Foundation in 2013.
De Brouwer's articles have been published by VentureBeat,, The Huffington Post, Techonomy, and others. His article, “How the People Are Taking Over the World,” was among Techonomy's Most-Read Articles of 2014 and was cited by its editors as “perhaps the most philosophical of Techonomy’s top articles” that year.
De Brouwer has two children with his current wife and a daughter from a previous marriage.