Published: Jan 13, 2026 | Last updated: Jan 14, 2026
A Year of Discovery and Building for What’s Next
2025 moved in a way you only notice when you stop long enough to look back.
It was a year where the work had to hold up on its own, not in slide decks but in production. In the product. In day-to-day conversations. In the way customers and partners chose to work with us.
You could hear it in conversations at events, from Team ’25 in California and Barcelona to SITS in London. In the questions people brought to the booth. And in the integrations they trusted us to take on.
One thing became clear early: the pace of collaboration is outgrowing the tools meant to support it.
Work is moving faster. Expectations are louder. Tolerance for friction is lower than ever.
Teams are collaborating across more systems than ever before, and many of those systems were never designed to work together in the first place.
Across the industry, the shift is moving from feature-heavy software to workflow-first systems. Tools that fit how work actually happens, end-to-end.
And integration has crossed a line — from nice to have to must work.
That shift guided almost everything we built, questioned, and refined this year.
A Clearer Picture of How Companies Actually Work
This year, we put language around something that’s been forming in our product and thinking for a long time: a clearer view of cross-company collaboration.
Companies don’t work in one system. They work across many, owned by different teams, vendors, and sometimes, priorities that don’t align.
Our vision starts from a simple truth: work happens across boundaries, whether tools were designed for it or not. As more teams acknowledged that reality, integration stopped being background plumbing and became part of how collaboration succeeds — or quietly falls apart.
When things break, it’s rarely one system at fault. It’s how systems interact under real-world pressure.
With that becoming clearer, a few priorities stood out:
Security is the baseline, not a differentiator
Context matters as much as data
AI only helps if it reduces friction without removing oversight
Those principles guided our product decisions throughout the year.
“Profitability isn’t the finish line. It’s the freedom to think long-term.” — Hilde Van Brempt, Co-Founder & CFO
What stood out more than the numbers was how customers chose Exalate. We saw higher-value use cases, longer horizons, and integrations moving closer to core operations. Teams weren’t just buying software, they were committing to complex, long-term integration work and expecting it to hold up.
Product & Progress
On the product side, the scope of delivery was significant:
10+ major connector improvement releases across Jira, ServiceNow, Salesforce, Azure DevOps, GitHub, and more
3 new connectors launched: Freshdesk, Freshservice, Asana—plus Azure DevOps (on-prem)
2 early-adopter programs to rethink how integrations are authored, reviewed, and governed
173 customer conversations informed our first-ever Field Report. Over 70% called Exalate “mission-critical infrastructure.”
Not a tool. Infrastructure.
Teams aren’t just integrating tools anymore — they’re integrating ways of working. And that changes what “good enough” looks like.
When Complexity Is the Job
The market didn’t shift neatly.
New players appeared. Others changed direction. Customer ecosystems became more fragmented, more interdependent, and harder to reason about from a single perspective.
Some teams responded by simplifying aggressively. We chose to experiment.
Citizen integrators
One area we explored was the rise of the citizen integrator: people closest to the workflow who understand what an integration needs to do but don’t necessarily want to write or maintain code.
Too often, integration logic gets locked in the hands of a few. We tested ways to make integration behavior easier to express and reason about — using clearer rules and language — without giving up precision, safety, or technical ownership.
Lowering the barrier to participation doesn’t mean removing expertise from the loop. It means making intent clearer — so when things break, the right people can understand and correct them faster.
The goal was accessibility with accountability.
Collaborative workflows
We also looked closely at how collaboration actually happens around integrations.
In practice, integrations rarely belong to one team. They connect systems owned by different groups — sometimes different companies — each with partial context.
Our aim was to make that collaboration explicit: shared review instead of assumptions, structured decisions instead of side-channel messages, and different paths depending on risk.
The payoff is fewer surprises, clearer ownership, and change that moves at the right pace.
Performance at scale
We invested heavily in the work users don’t always see.
As integrations move closer to core operations, performance and resilience stop being abstract concerns. The architectural work we started in 2025 lays the foundation for higher throughput, greater stability, and support for more complex data, so reliability doesn’t mean locking things down, and flexibility doesn’t mean losing control.
“Integrations sit deep in how your operations run. Customers are asking us to handle more complexity, at more scale, with less room for error. That’s the bar we’re building for.”
— Francis Martens, Co-Founder & CEO
These experiments reshaped our 2026 roadmap into the boldest plan we’ve built.
AI, Without the Theater
Where does AI actually help, and where does it get in the way?
Some companies treat AI like fireworks. We treated it like a co-pilot, not a free flight.
With Aida, our AI, the goal wasn’t automation for its own sake; it was clarity, helping teams reach a working integration faster, with fewer errors and less friction where it usually piles up.
In practice, AI supports decisions rather than replacing them. It surfaces options, reduces repetitive work, and makes complex setups easier to reason about, without turning control into a black box.
Logic, review, and accountability stay visible. Especially in environments where mistakes don’t stay small.
In integrations, AI shouldn’t make work invisible. It should make responsible work easier.
The Exavibe: Culture, Characters, and the Work Around the Work
Product decisions were only part of the story. Just as important was how we showed up — and how openly we talked about the unglamorous parts of integration work.
That mindset shaped several team favorites this year.
Integration Nightmares started from a simple observation: every integration project has its dark stories. Hidden costs. Data that didn’t arrive. Syncs that worked fine — until they didn’t. Instead of dramatizing them, we unpacked them. Because unnamed failures tend to repeat.
We also experimented with format and started The Sync Room series (hosted by Manoosh and Majid). It started from a familiar frustration: most integration talks are either too polished to be useful or too technical to follow. We stripped back the format — no scripts, no slides as crutches. Just real problems worked through in real time.
Alongside that, HERpower continued to grow — shaped by the women in the ecosystem themselves. Built with intention. Strengthened with every new voice. And continuing into 2026: bigger, louder, more visible.
We also moved offices. Still Antwerp. New address, same people, same values. A little more room to think.
Off the record: by our rough count, the team went through ~4,700 cups of coffee this year — because “just one quick sync” almost never was.
Our Bets for 2026
Diagnose before you execute. As AI accelerates configuration, understanding failure modes becomes more critical — not less.
Broader participation, tighter governance. More voices don’t mean less control. They demand clearer ownership, structured review, and explicit decision paths.
Integrations are operational infrastructure. They carry trust, compliance, and business continuity. That requires deliberate design — not shortcuts.
Change must be survivable. Integrations evolve. They should allow teams to test, adjust, and move forward without disruptive rewrites or high-risk switches under pressure.
What Comes Next
We won’t unveil it yet, but it’s taking shape.
Not a new product. A clearer, more intuitive way to work with the one you already trust.
Born from the insights of 2025. Built on architectural work already in motion. Guided by people who rely on Exalate in real environments every day.
We won’t promise magic. But you’ll feel the difference.
Here’s to better teamwork, across systems, across companies, across the Exaverse.
A Note From the Founders
“2025 helped clarify what’s worth taking time on, and what isn’t. That clarity is shaping how we build going into next year.
Thank you to our customers, partners, and community for the trust and the work we share.
From our Exaverse to yours — wishing you a 2026 full of strong connections and bright ideas.”
