Intelligent systems, built from bare metal to AI logic.
Valsty is the consultancy of Stijn Debakker, a CTO and solutions architect who has spent fifteen years building the full stack: servers and networks, real-time telephony, payments at scale, sovereign cloud, and the AI on top. One engagement, the depth of a whole team.
hardware, infra, and AI
leads engineering teams
to the logic the business uses
aviation enthusiast
Software, infrastructure, and the AI on top.
Engagements range from a single automation build to architecting, building, and leading the team behind a whole platform.
AI & Automation
LLMs, speech, and vision applied to the work a business actually runs on: automating internal operations across ERP, CRM, ticketing, and scheduling, plus billing, quoting, and document workflows. Built on the whole stack, from the hardware up to the logic the business uses, and kept private where it has to be.
Real-time & Voice AI
Telephony, VoIP, custom PBX, and softphones for public-sector and enterprise operators, plus the AI layer on top: voicebots, transcription, and call summarization, locally hosted and kept private so sensitive conversations never leave the building.
Payments & Ticketing
Cashless payment and ticketing platforms at venue and festival scale: RFID, handheld scanners, native iOS and Android apps, and settlement that always has to reconcile.
Sovereign Cloud & DevOps
Private, sovereign cloud, hosted in the EU or the UAE: CPU and GPU compute, managed databases, Kubernetes, and one-click deployment, with the DevOps to keep it reliable, for environments where data residency and uptime have to hold.
Solutions Architecture
The full arc from a whiteboard to a system running in production, designed for security, scale, and audit from the first line rather than bolted on afterwards.
Technical Leadership
Fractional CTO work, and building and leading the engineering team that delivers. That includes standing up a development team abroad, from scratch, as an expat CTO.
Multiple experts, for the price of one.
Each of these was a discipline in its own right. Fifteen years stacking them is why a single engagement covers ground that usually takes a team of specialists, and why nothing falls through the gaps between them.
Hardware & networks
Servers, Linux, game, web and mail infrastructure, and reverse-engineering protocols, packets, and memory. The bare-metal layer, learned the hard way.
Automation for SMEs
Turning manual back-office processes into reliable software for small and mid-sized businesses. This is where the habit of cutting busywork started.
Founder & co-founder
Founded and co-founded multiple startups and laid the technical groundwork for several more, building both the products and the teams to run them.
Telecom
Custom PBX and softphones, automated invoicing for a telco, and real-time call infrastructure that simply cannot drop.
Payments & ticketing
Cashless and ticketing platforms serving millions of visitors a year and moving millions of euros, with RFID, handheld scanners, and native mobile apps.
Regulated platforms
Building the platform for a private-markets business in a regulated financial jurisdiction, adding the data-residency and compliance layer to the stack.
Sovereign cloud & AI
Private, sovereign GPU cloud and Kubernetes, now folding every layer above into production AI systems that hold up under load and audit.
A sample, by sector.
Clients are kept deliberately general and described by sector. Happy to go much deeper in conversation.
Secure & mission-critical telephony
Emergency-grade telephony for public-sector and enterprise clients: custom PBX and softphones, including fully encrypted, VPN-only deployments for the most security-sensitive operators, with automated billing on infrastructure that can't go down.
Cashless payments & ticketing
Cashless and ticketing platforms owned end to end, from development and hosting to operations and support, at festival and venue scale: millions of visitors a year, millions of euros, RFID, handheld scanners, and native iOS / Android apps.
Sovereign cloud platform
A sovereign cloud platform, hostable in the EU or the UAE, with data residency built in: CPU and GPU compute, managed databases, Kubernetes, and one-click deployment, so workloads and data stay in the jurisdiction you choose.
Aviation platforms
Work across the aviation sector: flight-sharing and digital pilot logbooks, METAR / NOTAM integrations, flight-school and helicopter booking, and sector e-learning.
Private, self-hosted speech AI
Speech-to-text and summarization pipelines processing hundreds of hours of multilingual audio every month, running entirely on my own hardware and managed end to end, so nothing is sent to a third party.
Private-markets platform
Building the platform for a private-markets investment business, where data residency and the demands of a regulated financial jurisdiction shape the technical decisions from the start.
Engineer. Builder. Leader.
I'm a Belgian engineer and CTO based in Abu Dhabi. I started at the bottom of the stack, with servers, networks, and the unglamorous infrastructure, then spent fifteen years working up through automation, telecom, payments, and cloud into AI. That path is the point: I've been each of those specialists, so I can architect across all of them and see where they connect.
I don't just build, I build teams. I've worked as a CTO, hired and led engineers, and flew to Colombia to stand up a development team from scratch as an expat CTO. So an engagement can be me hands-on, or me architecting and leading the team that delivers it, then hands it back to you clean.
When I'm not architecting systems, I'm flying. I'm a helicopter pilot, and aviation is where the mindset I bring to everything comes from: focus, precision, and a refusal to ship anything that isn't safe to run.
Depth across the whole stack, in one engagement.
Multiple experts, one mind
One person who has actually built the hardware layer, the telecom layer, the payments layer, and the AI on top, so nothing gets lost in the gaps between specialists.
Production, not prototypes
Everything is built to run, be audited, and be handed over. I started where systems break if you get them wrong, and the habit stuck.
Build it, or build the team
Engage me hands-on, or to architect and lead the engineering team that delivers and then owns it long after I'm gone.
Tell me what you're building, or what isn't working.
I'll tell you honestly whether I'm the right person for it, and whether the answer is me hands-on, a team I build, or both. A short, paid discovery is usually the cleanest first step: a few weeks to map the problem and hand back a prioritized plan.