Walter De Brouwer (Dutch pronunciation: [ˈʋɑltər də ˈbrʌuər]; born May 9, 1957) is a Belgian-born businessman and semiotician.[1] He is the former CEO of doc.ai[2] and of Scanadu.[3] As a businessman, as of 2013, he took part in the creation of over 35 companies, including two that became publicly traded through Initial Public Offering.[4]
De Brouwer, born in Aalst, Belgium, is now an American citizen. He earned a Master's degree in linguistics from the University of Ghent and a PhD in Semiotics from Tilburg University.[5] He was a fellow of the Centre for Entrepreneurial Learning at Judge Business School at the University of Cambridge from 2004 until 2010.[6]
He was a lecturer at the University of Antwerp (UFSIA) and faculty professor at the University of Monaco. He is an adjunct professor at Stanford University Medical school (the Clinical Excellence Research Center).[7]
He was on the editorial advisory board of the Journal for Chinese Entrepreneurship.[8] De Brouwer is a member of the American Mathematical Society.
Former member of the Tau Zero Foundation (until 2013). He is now co-chairing the IEEE committee on Decentralized Clinical Trials.[9] and a member of the board of Linux Foundation Public Health together with IBM, CISCO, Tencent, VMWare[10]
De Brouwer set up Riverland Publications in 1990 to publish personal computer magazines.[11] In 1994, he sold his titles to VNU. He then published the cyberpunk magazine Wave, edited by Michel Bauwens and designed by Niels Shoe Meulman. Wave was a cult Belgian avant garde magazine.[12]
In 1996, De Brouwer was one of the founders of EUnet.[13] Eunet was sold to Qwest Communications in 1999.[14][15] He founded the employment website Jobscape.[13][2] In 2008, De Brouwer set up OLPC Europe, the European branch of One Laptop per Child.[16][17]
In 1996, De Brouwer founded Starlab together with MIT Media Lab founder Nicholas Negroponte.[18][19][20] Under De Brouwer’s direction, by April 2001 it had hired 70 scientists from 33 different countries.[20] Starlab went bankrupt in June 2001.[21]
De Brouwer is co-founder and former CEO of Scanadu, a company located at the NASA Ames Research Park in California.[3] and Scanaflo, an at-home, full-panel urinalysis testing device designed to give consumers immediate information about their liver health, urinary tract infections, and other vitals.[22] Scanadu was taken over by healthy.io (in 2020)[23]
De Brouwer stepped down from CEO of Scanadu in April 2016 and became a co-founder (along with his wife, Sam de Brouwer) and the original CEO of doc.ai., a Palo Alto, CA-based artificial intelligence company with a focus on digital healthcare,[2] including an app to help patients manage and analyze health data.[24] In 2020, he stepped down as CEO and was replaced by Sam De Brouwer (née Lounis); he stayed on with the company as chief scientific officer.[2] Doc.ai was acquired in January 2021 by the Atlanta-based digital health company Sharecare, who brought Walter De Brouwer onto their board as chief science officer as part of the merger.[25] Doc.ai was featured in Forbes when the company received a $100m contract from Anthem, the second-largest insurer in USA.[2]
In March 2022, de Brouwer co-founded Snowcrash, with backing from Sony Music and Universal Music Group, a platform for trading NFTs from musicians, with initial offerings from Bob Dylan and Miles Davis. De Brouwer’s co-founders at Snowcrash are Jesse Dylan, a son of Bob Dylan, and Jeff Rosen.[26]
De Brouwer is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts and served as President of RSA Europe from 2006 to 2008.[27] He is a member of TED. He was a distinguished lecturer at the National Science Foundation in 2013.
De Brouwer's articles have been published by VentureBeat,[28] The Huffington Post.[29]
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