Vincent Theeten, founder of Cheqroom, has joined forces with former marketing director Diederik Syoen to launch a new startup: Ringtime. The company automates both inbound and outbound phone calls using an advanced voice assistant. According to recent research, the average wait time when calling a business today is 11 minutes1.
When urgency is involved, people still prefer to pick up the phone. Over 75 percent of consumers choose calling over email or chat when speed matters, according to data from McKinsey2. Yet 62 percent of calls to small and mid-sized businesses remain unanswered3. Many of these are recurring questions that could easily be handled automatically.
“Consumers expect to speak to someone quickly. Most are willing to wait up to two minutes, but ideally they want to be connected within 20 seconds. They also expect businesses to be reachable outside office hours. That puts increasing pressure on customer service teams, leaving many customers without answers,” says Vincent Theeten, co-founder of Ringtime.
Handling inbound and outbound calls
Ringtime removes the wait. Its intelligent voice assistant answers calls immediately and handles conversations in more than 20 languages. If a question cannot be resolved right away, the caller is transferred to a staff member or routed to a ticketing system.
The platform also handles outgoing calls. It can schedule or reschedule appointments with ease, for instance when a technician becomes unavailable. The assistant is continuously learning. All conversations are analysed and feed into a growing knowledge base that helps improve responses over time.
“Real estate agents can receive hundreds of calls when a popular property hits the market. Once it is sold, our assistant can automatically notify the remaining interested callers. Technical teams working on tight schedules can rely on Ringtime to coordinate appointments more efficiently. And support teams can quickly collect and share insights based on real conversations, for example regarding e-invoicing,” says Diederik Syoen, co-founder of Ringtime.
Growth with focus
Ringtime was founded in 2025 by Vincent Theeten, who previously built equipment management platform Cheqroom into a 60-person team in Ghent and New York, serving clients such as Netflix, Disney and Amazon. Diederik Syoen, formerly head of marketing at Cheqroom and Peripass, is also part of the founding team. The initial focus is on the Belgian and wider European market, targeting sectors including real estate, utilities, facility management and technical maintenance.
“Our strength lies in our domain expertise and our deep integration into existing business processes. Many tools struggle with Europe’s multilingual environment. We do not. With our own funding and a small, experienced team, we aim to grow three times faster than Cheqroom did in its early years,” concludes Vincent.