Organizations spend months defining high-level business strategies, yet once execution begins, those plans rarely stay connected. Strategy lives in static PowerPoints, architecture sits in Visio, and execution is scattered across Jira boards. Shengo is disrupting this landscape with an AI-powered workspace.
Boasting deep industry expertise from founders who have led transformations at Microsoft and built Gartner-recognized tech platforms, the startup is currently opening doors to angel investors via a live round on Leapfunder. In this interview, Co-Founder Dennis Mulder outlines why strategy needs an AI-native workspace and how they plan to capture a massive slice of the trillion-dollar management consulting market.
- Hi Dennis. Thank you for agreeing to do the interview. Tell us about Shengo and the idea that got it all started.
It started in the executive boardrooms of some of Microsoft’s largest clients. While working as the CTO of Microsoft Netherlands, I kept seeing a brutal pattern: organizations would spend millions and months defining strategy, yet the moment execution started, everything broke apart.
Strategy lived in PowerPoint. Architecture lived in Visio. Projects lived in Jira. Meanwhile, high-priced consultants brought valuable frameworks but left behind nothing but static PDF reports. And while standard generative AI tools can write text faster than ever, they don’t actually understand how a business operates.
That is where I connected with Jordy. He had spent years solving this exact problem from a different angle as the founder of ValueBlue, building BlueDolphin into a Gartner Magic Quadrant enterprise architecture platform used by Meta, Disney, and others. We both realized that even with strong tools, the core strategy itself wasn’t a living system.
We founded Shengo to change that. We built an AI workspace centered around an “enterprise ontology”—a structured, living model of how a company’s goals, processes, applications, and decisions map out together.
- What problems are you trying to solve? What are the benefits of Shengo?
The problem is that markets are changing faster than organizations can adapt, yet companies still rely on rigid annual planning cycles.
Today, organizations fall back on three disconnected pillars: they use consultants for workshops, standard productivity tools like ChatGPT or Microsoft Copilot to write text faster, or transformation platforms to govern execution after the choices have already been made. None of these approaches captures the actual reasoning behind decisions: why choices were made, what alternatives were weighed, and what impact they have across the board.
That is the gap Shengo fills. Over time, Shengo becomes a strategic digital twin of the organization.
Instead of treating strategy like an annual document, leadership teams use Shengo to:
- Co-create strategy in a shared AI-powered workspace
- Represent strategy as structured models in an enterprise ontology instead of disconnected documents
- Capture decisions, assumptions, and trade-offs as part of the strategic model
- Continuously refine strategy as markets, priorities, and assumptions evolve
- Maintain traceability from strategic choices to capabilities, architecture, initiatives, and implementation
- Connect strategy, enterprise architecture, and execution in one living system
- Use AI agents to explore scenarios, evaluate trade-offs, and accelerate strategic decision-making
- You have a live round on Leapfunder. What makes it the right tool for your startup, and what do you expect from the round?
Leapfunder is the perfect fit for where we are right now. It gives us direct access to experienced angel investors and entrepreneurs who deeply understand enterprise software and appreciate category-defining opportunities.
We are looking for more than just capital. We want active investors who can help us validate this emerging category, introduce us to enterprise decision-makers, and become long-term ambassadors for AI-native strategy management.
The investment from this round will be deployed directly to accelerate our core product development, expand our AI agent reasoning capabilities, and support commercial growth across Europe, North America, and Asia.
- How much growth potential do you see for Shengo?
The upside is significant because we are witnessing the birth of an entirely new enterprise software category.
The first waves of AI helped individuals generate content and helped teams collaborate. The next wave will help organizations make high-stakes strategic decisions with extreme speed and alignment.
Strategy and management consulting represent a trillion-dollar global market. Yet, so much of that immense value is still delivered via manual workshops and slide decks. AI is going to disrupt this model. Not by replacing human consultants, but by turning strategy from an episodic, once-a-year advisory project into a continuously running enterprise software system.
Just as CRM became indispensable for sales and ERP became the backbone of operations, we believe AI-native strategy workspaces will become indispensable for leadership, architecture, and transformation teams globally.
- What are your plans for the upcoming months? Tell us about your go-to-market strategy and your plan for acquiring customers.
Our next phase is all about executing a highly targeted, scalable go-to-market strategy.
Our initial focus is on mid-sized and enterprise organizations undergoing heavy digital transformations, AI adoptions, or large-scale business shifts. Our initial pipeline relies on founder-led sales targeting companies where the pressure on strategy and execution is already boiling over.
In parallel, we are building powerful B2B momentum through partnerships with enterprise architecture consultancies and transformation agencies. Instead of leaving clients with static reports when an engagement ends, consultancies can leave behind a living strategic system inside Shengo. This creates a scalable, double-sided route to market where partners introduce us directly to enterprise buyers.
Over the coming months, we will onboard additional design partners, convert early enterprise traction into a highly repeatable sales motion, and scale our AI reasoning capabilities to prepare for international expansion.
Thank you for sharing your story, Dennis. We wish Shengo the best of luck in its future endeavours.
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