Joost De Bot is the newly appointed CEO of Maicell. Recently, I had the opportunity to speak with him about the company he now leads. Maicell has been around for about 17 years, and until recently, was known as ConnectPlaza. Besides naming De Bot as CEO, it also rebranded itself from ConnectPlaza. I spoke to him recently about the firm and his ambitions for growth.
Maicell was founded 17 years ago and has developed what it describes as a governed living intelligence platform. Back then, it was an IPaaS platform ahead of its time. Powered by AI, the platform can now be hosted on-premises, in a private cloud, or in a public cloud.
It is sold directly to enterprises and as an OEM solution through other vendors. As you’d expect, it integrates with standard SaaS solutions. It also integrates with applications that De Bot describes as “exotic” and with specific customer requirements.
As for Governed Living Intelligence, De Bot described it, saying, “All of this packaged together is what we call as a category governed living intelligence, which sits at the intersection of integration, enterprise, AI, execution, and then governance.”
The firm has around 1500 customers, both direct and indirect through partners. Its solution can be found across various industries, including wholesale, retail, transport, logistics, aviation, energy, and waste management. Over the last five years, Maicell has consistently grown at around 30% and maintained a healthy EBITDA of 30-35%. The board decided to invest those profits in further growth, and hired De Bot as CEO to lead that expansion.
Impressively, customer retention was between 98%-100% during that period. As De Bot noted, it is an attestation of customer loyalty and the stability of its systems.
Growth
Under the leadership of De Bot, Maicell is looking to expand. It has a strong presence in its home region, the Benelux, with other customers scattered across the world. However, De Bot remains focused. He intends to target the Nordics, Spain and the UK first.
Spain is where he is looking to build a tech centre with customer success, managed services and a development team. It will also support a partner’s go-to-market strategy in that country. The UK is attractive because of its maturity in IPaaS solutions, and Maicell is already hiring additional staff. Interestingly, De Bot intends to set up a subsidiary soon.
Beyond those countries, De Bot will also consider expansion into DACH, and France, but only if there is sufficient interest.
Funding this expansion is internal investment that will fuel the international growth, strengthen customer success and build a go-to-market engine jointly with partners. De Bot added, “Then we’re looking to grow our partner ecosystem and our existing customer base, to be honest, because all of our existing customers are facing the AI question mark”
A broad spread of partners
Those partners will consist of channel, implementation, and managed service partners. De Bot is also looking to build a managed service offering within Maicell.
De Bot added, “We see a gravitas towards managed service partners and OEMs, who in turn, look to managed service partners to help them build out the integrations to their customers.”
Maicell does have customers in the US and a partner. De Bot explained, “We won’t have an extremely aggressive go-to-market towards the US, but we will be looking at the opportunities there. But those will be more opportunistic, and let’s call it solely partner-driven.
“I’d rather go to Australia, especially given the current treaty between the EU and Australia, which was good news. We have a huge customer in Toyota, and we have a few partners there.”
On Funding
While Maicell has been bootstrapped and is now investing its own profits in growth, will it consider funding to accelerate that growth?
De Bot answered, “Let’s put it this way, we’re not for sale. But if there are companies that are interested in investing in our growth, we’re open to talk.”
On 2026
I asked De Bot what his ambitions are for 2026. He is looking to establish ‘governed living intelligence’ as a recognised category, and believes that Gartner is changing its quadrant from IpaaS to something else to reflect the solutions in the market. He hopes that Gartner will land on “governed living intelligence”, wishful thinking perhaps.
Secondly, De Bot aims to scale Maicell’s presence in the mid‑market and upper mid‑market, particularly through an expanded partner ecosystem. A key part of this strategy is the growth of the company’s own managed services capabilities, which will be especially important for higher‑end customers.
Through its defined category, Maicell intends to deliver on the promise of helping organisations address what is rapidly becoming a universal challenge: the structural gap in governing AI as it becomes embedded across enterprises.
Beyond 2026, the ambition is to become the number one IPaaS vendor in Europe. How that is achieved is important to De Bot. He says it will happen through a culture that is all about the people. He added, “Never forgetting what made us great until this moment, that we keep that same culture, no matter how big we scale.”
With regard to product development, De Bot stated that Maicell will continue to invest in its back-end fabric. It will also invest in both the intelligence and observability components to improve its governed intelligence platform.
On Maicel
The IPaaS market is crowded, and De Bot has been working for several competitors. How does Maicell differentiate, though, in such a congested market? De Bot explained Maicell’s differentiation stems from an architecture designed for control from the outset, 17 years ago. It has always been able to operate behind the customer’s firewall, keeping data and execution fully under customer control.
What was once framed as secure, flexible integration has become critical with the rise of AI. It makes governance unmanageable unless it is embedded directly in execution. It is a challenge that Maicell was born to solve.
With the ability to operate on-premises, Maicell can cater to organisations based in any sovereign nation. De Bot noted, “When you look at our platform, it’s geographically independent. Our US based. Customers can run it on-prem and be just as controlled and governed as in any other country.”
On IpaaS
Earlier in the conversation, De Bot mentioned that Gartner may rename the IPaaS quadrant. I asked him how AI is impacting IpaaS, which might prompt this change.
He replied, “The fundamental change or influence of AI is the speed with which you can build integrations that will probably be done through AI. But, governance, observability, runtime, execution, security, SLA management, those types of things will be the main focus of what is currently the IPaaS market because AI is coming into the organisation. “
De Bot believes the number of applications will continue to grow, with AI enabling the rapid creation of even more. It means that the control layer will become more important than the integrations themselves in the future, as companies need to manage an even faster-growing number of applications.
Why wasn’t the issue of governance and control solved before the age of AI?
De Bot commented, “Until recently, systems weren’t really acting autonomously, integration was about moving data from A to B. Governance could sit outside of the system. The exception was us, but AI just came up so fast that it changed everything.
“AI is finding data, and if uncontrolled, it’s finding data in areas where users actually shouldn’t access. It makes decisions based on information that either people shouldn’t have, or that isn’t relevant.”
Organisations forgot to install governance in favour of speed. However, boards are taking note, and if the governance layer is not strengthened, organisations could pay a steep price.
On Challenges
I asked De Bot what his biggest challenges are currently. He said, “Scaling is one of them. So the trick is always balancing, scaling, preserving culture, or preserving everything that made this company successful until now.
“That includes formalising the go-to-market, building processes around it, building a structured customer journey to success, expanding internationally, and setting up companies in other countries. But (doing) all of that without truly disrupting the culture that we have and that we focus on, drove the company to where it is now”.
And your priorities?
“Market education, and having people adopt governed intelligence. Help us set the category, but have them understand what it means to shift from connectivity to control.
“Scaling internationally is a big one. The Benelux market isn’t infinite, so that’s an important one, especially through a partner ecosystem. A partner go-to-market is vital for scaling.
“Exceptional customer experience, where we keep on doing what we’re doing, whilst we expand the product and our managed service offering.”
The Book Question
What was the latest book you read?
“I started reading several books, and I finished none of them. The one that pops to mind and is near and dear to my heart and very useful to scaling this organisation, but at a pace that everybody survives. Is The Infinite Game (Amazon Aus, UK, US) by Simon Sinek.”
De Bot also mentioned Atomic Habits by Simon Clear (Amazon Aus, UK, US).
