Our Story

Aardling was founded by Mathias Verraes in 2020. Mathias had been a freelance consultant traveling to clients across Europe to help with modelling, architecture, and eventually the software design strategy. He founded the DDD Belgium meetup in 2013 and the DDD Europe conference in 2016. For larger clients, he collaborated with other freelancers, and built up a small freelancer network.

However, as clients trusted him with more complex projects, the limitations of this approach with freelancers became apparent.

Aardling was founded to allow us to take on more ambitious cases, supporting our clients better, and provide more long term continuity. The people in the heart of this network decided to join forces. While we still rely on our network for specific expertises, we encourage collaboration between our consultants to create a greater brain.

In the first few years alone, Aardling has worked with Fortune 500 financial institutions, car manufactures, healthcare organisations, global port logistics companies, as well as B2B SaaS companies. Our experience across industries helps us to recognise patterns while remaining open to highly domain-specific situations.

From Mathias’ beginnings as one of the first DDD and EventStorming trainers, we now run the popular DDD Academy, and have trained thousands of people across the globe.

Our engagement with DDD Europe gives us a finger on the pulse of a community of experienced architects and tech leaders. It is a source of relationships, inspiration, and access to experts. As a logistics partner and occasional investor in other premium tech conferences such as Full Stack Europe and NewCrafts, we expand this to other software communities as well.