We help you find the gold.
The AI market is a goldfield: thousands of tools, and every one of them shines. Touchstone Router tests them against your business and routes you to the few that hold their value.
Between the enterprise and the frontier.
Pieter-Jan knows both sides of the table: what large enterprises need, and what start-ups can actually deliver.
As Venture Partner at Northzone, one of Europe’s leading venture capital firms, he backs early-stage companies in B2B software, fintech and AI, and sees what is coming before it reaches the market.
Before that he was part of the private equity investment team at EQT, one of the world’s largest private markets firms, where he worked on the €6bn+ IPO of Azelis and launched the Digital Media sub-sector. He started his career at McKinsey & Company in the Benelux.
Touchstone Router brings both views to one question: which tools will actually create value in your organisation?
- Venture PartnerOne of Europe’s leading venture capital firms, with more than $3bn under management. Early backer of Spotify and Klarna.
- Investment team, Private EquityOne of the world’s largest private markets firms, with €350bn+ under management. €6bn+ IPO of Azelis on Euronext Brussels, the largest Belgian IPO since 2004. Launched the Digital Media sub-sector.
- Analyst, Benelux
An old test for a new gold rush.
For more than two thousand years, assayers judged gold on a touchstone: a fine-grained black stone, also called the Lydian stone after the ancient kingdom where it was found.
Draw a piece of metal across the stone and it leaves a streak. Compare that streak with the marks of needles of known purity, then add a drop of acid. Base metal dissolves. Gold stays.
Enterprise AI needs the same discipline. Every vendor demo shines; far fewer tools survive your data, your security review and your people. We are the touchstone: an independent standard, applied to your needs, that shows what is real before you commit budget.
How we assay.
Define the need
We start with the work, not the tool: the processes, data, constraints and value at stake. One clear problem statement per use case, and an agreed measure of success.
Test against the standard
We map the field across established vendors and early-stage companies, then benchmark a shortlist on your own cases: quality, security, integration, cost and vendor durability.
Prove it, then roll out
Time-boxed pilots with agreed kill criteria. What survives is rolled out with procurement, change management and adoption support, so the tool is actually used.
Not every problem needs a new platform.
Sometimes the answer is a feature in software you already pay for, sometimes an incumbent vendor, sometimes a start-up few people have heard of yet, and sometimes building in-house. We route each need to the right answer, and we tell you when the answer is “not yet”.
Two sides of one market.
Buy what works. Ignore the rest.
For leadership teams, CIOs and transformation offices that need a defensible AI tool selection: what to buy, what to build and what to leave alone, with a path to real adoption.
Start a conversation →Built for the enterprise?
For AI companies with a product ready for enterprise scrutiny. Tell us what you solve and for whom. We follow the market closely, and products that hold up find their way into our assessments.
Get on our radar →Bring us the problem. We’ll test the answers.
Tell us briefly what you are trying to solve. Pieter-Jan replies personally.