A meal, a ride, a message. These are modest ambitions for a software company. They do not usually arrive accompanied by a trumpet. Yet Geert Houben has spent years building a business around them, on the reasonable suspicion that the small arrangements of daily life deserve better software than they often get.
The Belgian entrepreneur co-founded Cubigo in 2011 with Peter Willems. Its beginnings were personal: his grandmother wanted to remain at home, and his family’s experience prompted him to think about how technology could make everyday arrangements easier. The question would eventually take him from Hasselt to California, and into a business serving senior living communities on both sides of the Atlantic.
There is something usefully unfashionable about that starting point. A person has a preference. A family has practical things to organize. Somewhere between the two, an engineer sees a problem worth staying with. Houben’s career follows that problem through changing markets, new interfaces and the less photogenic business of getting people comfortable enough to use them.
A screen is only the beginning
Before Cubigo, Houben worked for five years at Hasselt University. He also developed software for customers of opticians, selling it to European retail chains. His education combined computer science and business economics, followed by innovation management studies at Vlerick Business School. The route put software development and the practical demands of a business within the same field of view.
Cubigo emerged as a university spin-off. Its early proposition gathered services into a common interface, reducing the number of separate digital habits a user had to acquire. In 2016, Houben received MIT Technology Review’s Innovators Under 35 Belgium recognition. He described the platform as “a whole range of services,” emphasizing the shared registration and familiar interface running through them.
That last detail carries much of the argument. Once someone has learned how a system behaves, the next task should feel familiar. Every additional screen can otherwise become a small entrance examination. Houben’s proposition gave the ordinary user a vote in a discussion too often dominated by the person demonstrating the software.
California, in ten seconds
Cubigo established a San Francisco office in 2014. The following year, Houben joined Blackbox Connect, a residential Silicon Valley program supported by Google for Entrepreneurs. He had visited California before, but living alongside other founders gave him a different view of its business culture.
One exercise forced him to explain Cubigo at several lengths, from ten seconds to half an hour. He remembered the first attempts at a three-minute introduction as chaotic. His account of the program also stressed introductions, credibility and the ability to attract a team. Even a software founder, it seemed, needed to become legible to people.
Back in Belgium, he joined Digital Minds, the group assembled around Alexander De Croo’s digital agenda. In a joint interview, Houben argued for a physical presence in the American market while keeping research and development in Belgium. The arrangement was concrete: get close to customers abroad, retain the technical talent at home. International ambition still required somebody to turn up in the room.
The research came with a room key
One of the more revealing episodes in Cubigo’s development belongs to a colleague. At Brookdale Redwood City, a team member lived in the community for a year to understand residents’ and staff members’ needs. The work informed a new version of the product, introduced there in 2018.
The setting made the problem visible. Front-desk staff handled a stream of requests. Paper carried information from one person to another. Transportation, meals and maintenance each had their own demands on attention. A system intended to simplify this world had to understand its routines, including the moments when another person was already very busy.
The rollout was gradual. Staff began using the software before residents did, and introductory Cubigo Cafe sessions helped residents learn it. Transportation became a particularly popular feature. These details give the company’s development story a welcome sense of proportion. A useful booking screen and a patient introduction can matter as much as the feature that looks good in a sales presentation.
That approach reappeared at HumanGood’s Las Ventanas community in 2022. Business Operations Manager Indira Vanhulle spent three weeks living and working there within the incubator program. Residents and staff suggested improvements; the team tested features and examined processes. Houben’s company was putting its people where the daily questions happened, with enough time to hear a second answer.
A Cubigo colleague lived inside a customer community. The experience informed a new product version in 2018.
The impatient founder learns to stay
Houben has been candid about the temperament behind that work. In 2020 he described himself as impatient and perfectionistic, a combination he acknowledged could make entrepreneurship difficult. He also spoke about the energy the company consumed, the departure of his co-founder, and his worries about time missed with his daughter, partner and friends.
That admission complicates the tidy founder biography. The person arguing for more humane software also had to reckon with the demands of building it. Progress could be exciting and expensive in the same afternoon. His account leaves room for both the attachment to the work and the people whose time it borrows.
He used the phrase “high-touch” to describe Cubigo’s emphasis on implementation, training and human interaction. For a founder who wants things to move faster, that is an interesting discipline. Teaching people a system happens at their pace. The business depends partly on doing patient work while wanting impatient results.
“Developing with the end-user instead of for the end-user.”
Geert Houben · 2021 industry panel
Dinner is an engineering problem, too
As Cubigo expanded, the argument became increasingly operational. Its April 2018 US announcement included a $4.5 million funding round led by Urbain Vandeurzen, participation from Transvision, an Apple mobility partnership and a planned Lyft integration. Houben also described an Ohio meal-delivery pilot that reduced a nine-step paper process to two digital steps. It was a specific pilot, with a pleasingly unglamorous subject.
The Canadian expansion added another layer. Cubigo announced its Toronto office in February 2020, saying local contracts called for a permanent presence. Houben had demonstrated the company’s features at a January event co-hosted with Apple, followed by a conversation with Amica’s chief marketing officer, Sean Taggart. The international business was growing through local relationships as well as software.
In 2022, Houben introduced a hospitality suite combining community engagement with functions such as point of sale. His argument focused on the problems created by fragmented applications, including lost productivity and missed charges. Dining could become the meeting point of a resident’s request, a staff member’s task and an operator’s accounts.
That makes the business rather more intricate than its everyday examples suggest. A request is simple from the resident’s end because somebody has done the work of connecting the departments behind it. There is a certain courtesy in good systems design: the user gets to finish the task without attending a meeting about the organization chart.
Let people choose the doorway
Houben has also pursued different ways into the same services. A 2022 partnership with Enseo made Cubigo requests available through a resident’s television. His explanation centered on choice of device and the usefulness of a large screen already present in the room. The television, rarely invited to technology’s fashionable parties, had an obvious practical advantage.
At an industry panel in 2021, he had stressed co-creation with operators. His formulation put users alongside developers in shaping the product. It is a small grammatical change with consequences for the calendar: more conversation, more testing and more opportunities for a customer to complicate an elegant theory.
In April 2026, Cubigo announced its forthcoming Nova AI Assistant, describing text and voice access for questions and service bookings. The proposed uses included finding activities, checking lunch and handling routine enquiries. Houben subsequently emphasized voice as a way to remove interface barriers. The technology had changed; the familiar question of how someone gets something done remained.
The announcement described an assistant to come. Its appeal lay in a recognizable ambition: let the resident ask naturally, and let staff spend less time answering the same question. The everyday usefulness of that ambition will be judged wherever it is used, one request at a time.
A button worth pressing
The company’s more recent updates supply a grounded way to think about that test. In June 2026, Cubigo appointed Chris Mohrman vice president of growth, giving him responsibility for sales, marketing and enterprise go-to-market strategy. The business still needed experienced people to make the connections around its connected software.
Then, in October, Cubigo reported average resident engagement of 67-68% for the Cubigo-powered Arrow App across Arrow Senior Living communities, with some reaching 80-90%. Those are company-reported figures for that customer, rather than a universal score for the platform. Alongside the numbers came descriptions of people finding events, checking menus and connecting with neighbors who shared their interests.
One resident’s advice was particularly good: “You can’t hurt anything!” There is an entire adoption strategy hiding in that reassurance. Curiosity becomes easier when a person feels free to press a button without summoning a small administrative disaster.
Houben’s published ambitions include inspiring young people to change things. His own example is an extended exercise in taking ordinary things seriously. The meal, the ride, the message: each is a small piece of someone’s day. Arrange enough of them thoughtfully, and an international software business begins to acquire a very human unit of measurement. Did the person get to do what they wanted?