Imagine a future… AI and Robotics is moving faster than any institution can keep up with. Companies scramble to adapt and students graduate into a world their curriculum never prepared them for. The velocity gap widens every day. Knowledge is siloed, industries don’t talk to each other and the people who should be building together have no way of connecting. northstar is an independent non-profit gathering and educating the generation that will inherit this world. An event is a dot. A community is a line. Dots don’t compound. Lines do. The gap closes when people share what they know. Ecosystems accelerate when builders collide often enough for something to happen. Belgium has the talent. We’ve brought 3000+ builders together, and over 20 hires came out of connections made at our events. Weekly Open Lab Thursdays at our AI & Robotics lab in the Antwerp port, with Port of Antwerp-Bruges. Uniting the robotics and AI communities across NL, BE, and LU at Eindhoven University of Technology. Community edition of the global ElevenLabs hackathon — voice AI builders shipping in Ghent. Bring us a challenge your organization wants to solve. We’ll help shape a focused hackathon and guide it from planning to prototypes. Do you remember the moment you knew what you wanted to do in life? The velocity gap between how fast AI and Robotics move and what people understand widens every day - it affects everyone. In 2025 we organized the Belgian chapter of the worldwide Kids AI Hackathon and it became the biggest edition in the world - 8 venues across 6 cities, 80 volunteers and 100 kids building with AI for the first time. These kids are growing up in an AI-native world and our job is to make sure they don’t just consume it but learn to build with it. In 20 years, they will be the ones writing this website. For students, the fear of AI is pushing people away from the very field that will define this century. They graduate into a world their curriculum never prepared them for. We believe robotics should be deeply embedded in education - and that both AI and Robotics will be the catalyst that puts the Benelux on the map. We bridge the gap between students and industry, and put them on the track to become the practitioner that will one day lift up another student. For professionals, Belgium runs on SMEs. Automation is their biggest AI opportunity, but the gap between knowing that and knowing how to act on it is where most companies stall. We give teams the understanding to either define what they need or build it themselves. Every member of our core team builds. We have a bias towards action and an engineering mindset that strips every problem down to its simplest form before solving it. Without building, the rest is just conversation. Every product we’ve made started as a problem we hit ourselves (etoile, Polaris). That same drive extends to companies - through R&D residencies we explore and prototype solutions fast, either by embedding with a team or by running a hackathon around their problem. We’ve worked on humanoids, industrial arms, robot dogs and SO-101 LeRobot arms. In 10 years these machines will become more and more a part of our daily lives, and by having access to them we have a duty to show people what’s coming - to give a glimpse into a future that’s closer than we think. Some of the strongest builder ecosystems in Europe are a train ride away - London, Paris, Amsterdam. The potential of connecting them is enormous and largely untapped. This isn’t something one non-profit can solve alone. As an independent organization, we partner with builder communities across Europe - different ecosystems have different strengths, and connecting them makes everyone stronger. Sponsorships are one of the ways we fund these operations, and every partner who backs us is investing in the infrastructure that connects builders across Belgium and Europe. Belgium has a very important role to play in the coming years. It sits at the heart of the European Union, where a strong builder community has direct proximity to the policymakers shaping AI and Robotics regulation. No other region in Europe combines this university density, port infrastructure and logistics network in such a small area. That makes it a testbed for the next chapter of robotics, and a bridge between ecosystems that are a train ride apart. We’re here as a grassroots catalyst to make it happen.