Gregory Aerts understood the technology gap between large and small businesses from both sides. His parents’ careers in small business brought conversations about limited budgets and fewer options. Later, at Van Lanschot Kempen, he spent five years building data and AI products, including a risk-analytics team. He saw what became possible when a business had the resources to put its information to work.
Custodea is his attempt to make those capabilities accessible without requiring a department to build them. The Dutch startup has raised €350,000 in seed funding from investors in its network to support its platform launch and expansion across Europe.
Its starting point is a problem that buying more software does not necessarily solve. A company can have accounting records in Exact Online, customer information in HubSpot and employee data in Personio, yet still depend on someone collecting exports to understand the business as a whole. The information is digital. Bringing it together remains work.
Custodea leaves those applications in place. Instead, it copies their records into a private, European-hosted data lake: a separate environment that customers can connect to Excel, Power BI and other analytical tools. The company says its connectors are read-only and never write changes back into the original systems. Businesses decide which tools and partners receive access.
That makes an ordinary exchange with an accountant a useful illustration. Rather than preparing another file whenever information is needed, a business can authorize the accountant to read the consolidated records. Access can be revoked, and the accountant can continue using familiar reporting tools. Custodea’s proposition is to make sharing information less dependent on repeatedly packaging and sending it.
AI enters through that same foundation. The platform offers conversational analytics for questions about business information, including revenue trends and outstanding invoices. But the less conspicuous work comes first: connecting the records an answer depends on. An assistant becomes more useful when the relevant information is available to it, rather than scattered across applications it cannot access.
For Aerts’ intended customers, however, technical capability must survive a practical budget decision. Custodea’s Essential plan costs €495 a month before VAT on monthly billing, including three connectors and daily synchronization. That gives buyers a concrete comparison: does the service remove enough recurring reporting and data-preparation work to justify another subscription?
The promise of control also extends to leaving. Custodea says customers who cancel retain read-only access for 30 days to export their information before deletion from disk. It is an exit window, not a promise to host the database indefinitely. Independence still requires a plan for where the records go next.
Trust is another part of the work ahead. Custodea says its primary infrastructure is in Germany, with encrypted backups in Finland. Its security page lists ISO/IEC 27001 certification and SOC 2 Type II as planned milestones, rather than completed assessments.
Aerts says he still writes much of the platform himself and speaks with customers most days. That keeps the founder close to the question his product must answer: whether infrastructure becomes genuinely simpler for the people expected to use it.
The seed round funds the launch. The more meaningful evidence will come afterward, in reports that take less preparation and questions owners can answer without another round of requests.
Aerts once built teams to make business data useful. Custodea’s challenge is to bring that usefulness to companies that cannot build the same teams.
