Becoming the Intelligent Open Digital Experience Company

In the Dropsolid diaries series, I talk in-depth about the journey of Dropsolid company that has Drupal at its core. It contains Drupal insights, company insights, personal experiences, DXP and CMS market insights, and many other learnings I learned as the founder of Dropsolid & Dropsolid AI.

(Note: I usually don't post the Dropsolid Diaries post to the Drupal planet but this time I believe it contains valuable business insights that matter for Drupal.)

This long read is part of the Dropsolid Diaries series. The previous chapters can be found below:

• Part 1 covers our startup days, which taught us about running a business, funding, hiring & training talent, sales, and marketing.
• Part 2 is all about the first scale-up stage. It discusses how we improved our overall product development, growth, vision, mission, values, corporate structure, procedures, and business units.
• Part 3, is about becoming profitable and laying the foundation of the digital experience company.
• Part 4, is about the transition of Dropsolid toward two business units: The Dropsolid experience cloud and the Digital experience agency that delivers products and services to help customers achieve the best digital experience in all freedom.
• Part 5 is about merging Dropsolid back together into the Dropsolid digital experience company and the internationalisation of the the Open DXP based on the Dropsolid experience platform.
• Part 6, we'll cover: 2024 as a year where we made our first steps on the international terrain and where we truly started operating as a global player with our unique open DXP vision. Looking forward at 2025 as a year we are at what I believe to be the start of the final frontier of open web development. 

I already predicted a big shift in webdevelopment, I didn't expect it to materialise so quickly. I am of course talking about the AI. It really felt like this:

Video: Dropping into the 4.5m ramp :) 

In Part 7, I’ll go deeper into how Dropsolid is becoming the AI-driven Digital Experience company: what we’re building, how we’re packaging AI into real services and product capabilities, what we learned from early deployments, and how we think open source and sovereignty will define the next era of digital experience. 

The market is down

After a great year in 2024, I had a bit of an existential crisis. Dropsolid was doing great but I saw the storm clouds packing together at the horizon. Many others were already in the storm. I’m talking about the storm hitting agencies worldwide and I have a lot of respect for the leaders and teams trying to protect their people and customers through it. Revenue streams are down, margins are down. And on top of that AI is hitting the market full force.

It was a perfect storm:

1 Global economic fear for recession, fueled by tarrif wars, real wars and generally a vibe that is bad for business.

2 Some AI-first tools and companies are making bold promises, sometimes too bold, about building enterprise applications and websites with minimal effort.

Image: An example of a company promising enterprise apps where 80% is vibe coded. 

3 Many Drupal businesses are struggling to build and close pipeline and I know how heavy that feels when you’re responsible for a team.

Image: From the business dinner at Drupalcon Vienna 2025

You can image the perception arising with at customers (who are also under pressure and trying to make every euro count and honestly, I can’t blame them for asking hard questions right now) you can get projects of multiple 100k at the price of simple website, it is not easy to sell value.

But this picture doesn't say it all, more on it later.

Time for Transformation

Instinctively knowing what would happen already in 2024 we decided that we would have to disrupt ourselves and re-invent ourselves if would have to stay relevant. So we decided to split the business into 2 parts.

Image: the evolution of Dropsolid throughout its existence.

So here we arrive at the Intelligent Open Digital Experience Company. Perhaps Open and Intelligent are a bit synonymous :)

What is it?

• Dropsolid solutions is the original Dropsolid entity that helps organisations design, build, host and deliver secure, scalable and intelligent digital experiences. With the Digital Experience Platform (DXP), equipped with a CMS, Marketing Automation, CDP and AI, we strengthen your digital autonomy across data, applications and intelligence.
• Dropsolid AI is the new platform company that brings all the required components for an open DXP (CMS with Drupal, Marketing automation with Mautic & Personalisation with Unomi) with AI capabilities on a cloud agnostic ISO27001 certified platform. We aim to offer a Digital Experience Enablement Platform and an open DXP.

The vision for the two companies:

Did we land it first try? No, just like the drop in into the ramp what you don't see are the tries that went before. The first time I dropped into the ramp, the acceleration was much faster than expected and I felt from the board. Unfortunately I don't have a video of that :) But I did hurt myself a bit and that day I didn't try again. But I came back to it a week or so later and then I was even more scared than the first time but with the experience of the first drop I knew how fast it would go. And the second time I did ride away.

In the same way splitting the business and trying to launch Dropsolid AI was similar. We wanted to split of the DXP business earlier in 2021-2023 (which you can read in part 4 & 5) but we were not fully ready for it causing us to remerge both parts. But now we were at our second try and we kind of knew what would be needed. Although it was still a risky operation and the administration that comes with doing such an operation while at the same time trying to fund raise for both Dropsolid AI and Drupal AI & running an existing 9M€ business in a market that is down was a lot to handle in one year.

But the good news is

We did manage to raise almost 1.6M€ for Dropsolid AI.

If you are a Drupal business owner that has already exited his business, reach out, you'll be in good company, 5 of our investors 12 were in fact ex-drupal business owners.

We did raise 1M$ for the Drupal AI initiative. 

And we have our first AI customers in production. We rolled out a full AI services offering in less than 6 months.

How were we able to do this so quickly? Well, if you read the blogseries you'll figure out that we have been building Dropsolid for the AI age all along. Just like Dries wrote Drupal was accidentally build for the AI age, for us AI was also the missing piece of the open DXP puzzle. We had all the pieces of the puzzle, the CMS, marketing automation, the data layer we've build for the CDP, even Nick Veenhof & I already envisioned AI would be the next thing back in 2019 and we put Machine learning capabilities in our personalisation product. It did take another 5-6 years for AI to really be a differentiator in the market. Well it is more than a differentiator, it is a requirement.

Doing so we also had build a product team that was capable of absorbing this new technology stack in record time. In januari we did a full scale hackaton with external people, people from the solution teams and the product team and we wanted to prove that we could solve easy use cases like search, deploying, ... with agents. In only one week sentiment at the company around AI shifted from interesting to: "Boss, if you don't invest in this it will be bad :)". I replied:"No worries the wish to invest was already there". I had had my existential fears already around AI, having the team on board just kept accelerating the process.

Perhaps the first move we made was just before christmas 2024, we rehired Frederik Wouters one of the Drupal Ai module contributors. He told me in 2023 Domi we must start an AI company. I didn't do it then but in october 2024 I called Frederik and told him that he was totaly right and that we should start an AI company.

What we also did throughout all the years was re-invest most of the money we made into Dropsolid platform. We will have perhaps invested 5M€ in profits+grants (thanks to VLAIO) into the Dropsolid platform, which is like 2/3 of the profits we made during our existence. The other 1/3rd of the profits that was still left after was sitting on the Dropsolid bank account. And a big chunk of our profits also went into open source contributions, sponsoring Drupal as a Diamond level DCP, sponsoring on the Diamond level on 7 Drupalcon EUs now and sponsoring Mautic on the Diamond level for 2 years in a row earning Mautic partner of the year twice.

In retrospect being so frugal with money, investing in innovation & contribution and not taking much out in salaries as founders during the first 10 years allowed us to have a chance in launching Dropsolid AI as a seperate company and make a statement to the market that Dropsolid is a group of technology companies that is capable of delivering open intelligent digitale experiences. Exactly what the market is asking for. 

So it was not just a sudden pivot, it was in the making since our inception, the DNA of Dropsolid has always been to innovate, productise, contribute and find the next level. AI for us was a natural  trigger to make this next move that was in the making for a long time.

With all the pieces of the puzzle in place and we dared to drop in solid :) 

How did we execute?

See the full video stream here: 

Below we will talk about the highlights.

Here are all the video's I Shared: 

January - AI is the way

We did our first AI event and we had to close registrations at 75 people because it was at our office and we could allow more. First sign AI was in demand. 

In that same month we did the hackaton I talked about earlier.

February

We acquired Pictonio with Dropsolid Holding, a portuguese Drupal specialist. The idea was not only to increase our near shoring capabilities but also to test how we can use a local Drupal entity to bring our AI DXP product to a local market.

I also started reaching out to find our new CEO for Dropsolid solutions.

Meanwhile Frederik was bringing Dropsolid closer and closer to the action around Drupal AI. This was before the Drupal AI initative came about.

March - First appearance

First public appearance of Dropsolid AI at Supernova. Where I got to pitch without slides because they were gone. I turned out to be better and got really good feedback from the judges. It gave me a boost of confidence that we are on the right track. Supernova did put me in contact a lot of VC funds but felt there was a better way to raise the money in this round.

We launched a preview of the DXP product we are working on. Niels Aers joined Dropsolid AI after 10 years in Dropsolid solutions to lead the product team. The team is growing.

We also made plans for the splitting of the business and the funding round. The first thing we did was an internal funding round and we raised 275k from the founders, existing investors, management team and employees.

We also visited Drupalcon USA. Our USA adventure this year has gotten a bit snowed under because of obvious reasons. For the moment we have pauzed any US investments. Jeroen is still in NY we don't closed the door but we will wait for better days. Jeroen in the meanwhile became the COO & CMO of Dropsolid AI and he operates a global team with a home base in Europe. Selling sovereign AI solutions was just so much easier in Europe, especially as an EU company we clearly felt the effects on customers asking questions. We expect this trend to continue given recent developments.

As an EU company we have the ambition to be a global company. The title of part 5 is: Becoming the global open digital experience company.

I still believe in the one world principle. Although certain conditions in the world make it difficult to be a global company and trade wars make it difficult to invest more in certain countries. We will never close the door on anyone. 

Another reality is that we do realize we need to strengthen our own foundations here in Europe to stand strong and to be able to have negotiation power. But we don't want to be dragged into grabbing what we can and over nationalistic reflexes.

What comes to mind is the parable of the table in heaven and in hell.

Image from celestialpeach: 

I want to be at the table in heaven and feed each other. Between countries, continents, in the community, in our group of companies, in the company, ... everywhere. 

So we are not closing the door on anyone in the US. A lot of Drupal has been supported in the US. 

Business wise we are going to focus on the EU and the rest of the world.

We are also realistic of the threath and the opportunity for Europe to become more sovereign and it fits our philosophy since the beginnig of our existince. So we joined https://eurostack.eu/ because it aligns so much with our values. Our ambition: become a leading sovereign, open, AI-powered DXP in Europe. We believe we’re a strong candidate to contribute meaningfully to the Eurostack vision and we’ll work to earn that.

April - Early Drupal AI

The Drupal Ai initative was formed at Drupal dev days in Leuven. Dropsolid, Freely give, Acquia, Salsa digital and 1xInternet sat down with Dries with the intention to form an initative. Dries gave us his blessing and we started organising the initative. I was put in the lead of exploring the Drupal Ai strategy with potential buyers and get early feedback. And I also tried to raise money.

We found our new CEO Carlo Schots who started leading Dropsolid solutions and ended up turning Dropsolid solutions together with Steven my co-founder and team the investment into Dropsolid AI into a profit.

In all honesty. Launching Dropsolid AI was taking a lot from Dropsolid solutions. It took away focus of both Steven (focussing on all the business admin of splitting a company) and myself (raising money for both Drupal AI & Dropsolid AI) to launch Dropsolid AI, in combination with a though market we needed to make sure we ran a really thight ship.

May - Securing the foundations

Steven & I launched operation Phoenix that required the solution company to focus on raising profitability. We did feel the market was down and we need to buccle down. This operation focussed on being as profitable as possible so we could launch the AI company. The fact we have now 2 companies, each with their own CEO made this possible.

I visited the Open source founder summit and this was great because other founders connected me with their investors. Awesome. Really heart warming to feel so much support. Open source is about feeding each other.

At Drupaljam the first deals were made for the Drupal Ai intiative:

June - Drupal AI born

9-6-2025 Drupal AI initiative is born, we raised 120k$ with the 5 founding members (Dropsolid, Acquia, 1xInternet, Freelygive, Salsa) + Amazee and the initative was born. 

At 9-6-2025 we also launched the Angel funding round for Dropsolid AI. Going for Angels was the best choice to keep maximum control over a company, although 1M€ in revenue is still considered preseed.

Here was the lastest crowd funding part (sold out in a record time of 8h!) that also explains the whole financing setup which continues into the new year.

That same week we were in London with the AI initative. Had a bit of a passport issue but finally got there 1 day later.

Not even a week later, we were present at OW2 con in Paris at our customer Orange their HQ 

The tone was very much on digital sovereignty. 

Mid June Carlo our new CEO also started and we prepared for the next phase of launching the new company.

July - Dropsolid AI born

It's alive.

2-7-2025 the legal entity Dropsolid AI is born. We launched the company with a capital of 275k and raised in the next 6 months in total +-1.6M. A lot happened.

We had our C-level offsite in Paris where we created the plan for the next 6 months. Steven & Carlo focussed on Dropsolid Solution and Jeroen & I would focus on bringing in the funding.

August - Summer time = funding time

I didn't take a summer holiday this time because of 2 reasons:

Raising money for Drupal AI: Literally worked the list and did dozens an dozens of meetings. In the end it paid of by the end of september and just before Drupalcon we secure 1M$ in funding. In the beginning we had a slow start. After the announcement only 1 partner wanted to sign up in the first 6 weeks. This urged us to make a change to the program. We added the DCP coefficient which allowed them to get a discount based on location and size. This worked. In the next two month we signed up 15 new partners for a total of 22. If you want fill in this form to join or just contact me directly at dominique@dropsolid.com.

We also met during the summer with the initative:

And I became a board member of the Drupal association.

Raising money for Dropsolid AI: Initiatlly it went really well. Several funds/syndicates of angels were making sizeable non binding offers. However the way we structured the round made it a bit difficult for classical VCs to enter. They were asked to enter the company in a convertible loan agreement (CLA) which would convert into a foundation of investors. Also Dropsolid AI owned by Dropsolid holding so they are not sitting in the captable with the founders but with another investment company. It scared a lot of VCs to work like this, which is understandable, because the structure is uncommon and adds perceived complexity for many funds. I also figured out pretty quickly raising money at seed and serie A level was in a crisis. In Belgium the collective amount raised in 2024 was 1.4B€ and it seems that in 2025 we would not even reach 780M€ (source). However at the pre-seed level where individual investors are active there was a lot of action going on. So that is where it all happened.

This caused me to consider a new strategy. What if we could raise from individual investors, leverage this with loans and finance the first 18-24 months like this? Well we are a bit over half with this. We raised +-600k from individuals in the CLA, we had the 275k from our own internal effort, 500k from a bank and 200k from a crowd funding. Now another 400k is open, if you are professional investor you can still join, contact me at dominique@dropsolid.com

Among the individuals we have: 5 ex-Drupal business owners (some of them even ex-competitors), 2 tech entrepreneurs, 1 customers/partner, 1 experience VC who is investing privately and several industry experts. We had a christmas dinner together in Belgium right before the holidays and it felt great to be in the company of all those people to support me and to get guidance from very experienced entrepreneurs.

September

Dropsolid became a Diamond level Drupal certified partner. This is a dream come true. At that time we were the largest contributor on the EU mainland.

Drupal camp Spain in Santiago was special because not only where Drupal sponsors coming in we were also closing very important deals with investors. Perhaps the beautiful cathedral of Santiago was the place to go and contemplate and attract the forces of goodness :)

October

In October the big event was Drupalcon EU where Dropsolid was a Diamond sponsor. This year the first time as a boardmember. 

Here Dries announced the 1M$ funding in the AI initiative. A key milestone. At Drupalcon we also launched the RFP which is now being fullfilled on the product level by 1xInternet and where Dropsolid is doing the product management and the inovation lot which is being managed by Freelygive and fullfilled by QED42.

November

Beginning of november we did our business/funding event to communicate that we had raised almost 1.4M and to showcase what is happening in the local ecosystem around AI.

Later that week I was at Tectonic, a funding event to meet with more investors and potential customers.

December

In December we were in Paris at the open source experience days on the Orange booth promoting together with 9 other vendors from Orange open Source use.

And to close the year we also had a succesful funding round of 200k which put us at almost 1.6M€ :

Meanwhile in the ecosystem ...

Not everyone is as prepared for AI hitting the market so hard. Here are some slides from the Drupal survey at Drupalcon Vienna. These slides can look discouraging at first glance. I want to add context so we can read them fairly and respond constructively. I want Drupal not only to look good but also to look right because the slides from the survey might paint a too negative picture. So I want to take the most negative slides and give my comments on it so the perception is more towards how it really is.

If we would show this slide, which shows what the pipeline expectations of the agencies are one would get the impression it doesn't look good.

Image: Expectations for the Drupal agencies pipeline for 2026

What is my interpretation.

The first thing I look at is, is the green part, however small it is. Why is there? What is it? Who expects growth? Why? There seems to be growth outside of the US and EU in Latin America, Asia and other regions. The reason for that could be customers are looking for a better price to support their Drupal platform. Another growth engine is using Drupal as a platform for open intelligent digital experiences, AI powered digital experieces. Although small, this is the future of Drupal. The Drupal AI initiative that is growing as we write is targetting to accelerate this growth. (5 new partners joined since Drupalcon and I have a list of dozens more to contact in the New Year that said they would have budgets ready.

The second would be to make sure the CEO's of these Drupal agencies stay motivated and get told that they have to do more sales, ... As if it were that simple. I’ve been in that seat, and I know it’s rarely just “do more sales.” A bit of kindness would be more in place towards the people that are carrying the load of trying to keep and create jobs for a lot of people in the ecosystem. Most of these CEO's are also carrying the DCP program paying for the infrastructure supporting Drupal. In the Drupal AI initiative we are talking to CEO's in a way that they see the AI transition as a capital expenditure rather that trying to make investments purely form operational budgets while everyone needs to be billable to pull their weight.

And third, I would also focus on being more accurate. Telling CEO's certain industries are to be avoided because they don't have money is maybe not quite right. If there is ROI there is always money, no matter which industry you are focussing on. What we need to do is to understand our industries problems better and solve them more intelligently with intelligent digital experiences.

What is remarkable is that agencies are expecting growth, although less than the year before, but still. Where are the agencies expecting growth?

Conflation: “share of Drupal revenue” ≠ “Drupal market shrinking”

The deck repeatedly treats “share of Drupal revenue shrinking” as “Drupal shrinking.”

But share can shrink because:

• The company added new revenue lines (AI services, other CMS, product work, data/SEO), while Drupal stays flat or even grows.
• Drupal projects got more maintenance-heavy (lower build revenue, more support revenue), changing mix.

Given overall revenue expectations are positive, it’s risky to claim a straightforward Drupal “market shrink” without also showing:

• Absolute Drupal revenue change (in currency bands), not only direction,
• Or at least a cross-tab: “total revenue changed how?” vs “Drupal revenue changed how?”

Right now, the narrative reads like: “Drupal is shrinking everywhere,” while the data could also be saying:

“Agencies are diversifying because the market is uncertain.”

A deeper Truth

Many agencies haven’t had the same room to invest in product or platform work, often for understandable reasons (margin pressure, client demands, staffing). That makes the AI transition harder, and I empathize with that. The gap isn’t effort or talent, it’s usually time, capital, and focus. And that’s exactly what we’re trying to help with.

What they lack at the moment is the means to unlock the power of Drupal for their customers.

As a Drupal Agency CEO (which I was for 12 years), I would try and look how I can again bring the strengths of Drupal to my customers. How can I sell it a the best open source Ai powered content management & the foundation of the digital experience platform that can solve complex and expensive problems surrounding everything that touches content and digital experience in a company?

The questions I ask customers is: How are you going to apply the power of AI and unlock productivity and better experience with AI on the level of your content and digital experiences? Have you any idea how big the business case is here?

And then deliver the value proposition: Drupal can deliver the speed and innovation of AI without losing the transparency, context management, and control that organizations require. It will unlock the ROI from operational efficiency and better user experience without losing trust.

But how do you unlock Drupal its value if you lack critical capabilities and your development services become less valuable. More and more comes out of the box. That is why we want to empower agencies with our platform to stay relevant.

Before I go further: I know many agencies, product teams, and communities are under real strain. I genuinely wish stability and clarity for everyone navigating this transition, competitors included. We’ll all do better if we can stay human and help each other where we can.

Transforming into the AI powered Digital experience company

 When I look back at 2025, it feels like the year the market forced everyone to choose: wait for clarity or move through the storm.

For us, the choice was clear. We didn’t want to be the kind of company that survives by shrinking its ambition. We wanted to become the kind of company that stays relevant by compounding its DNA: innovate, productise, contribute, and keep pushing for the next level.

That’s what the split into Dropsolid Solutions and Dropsolid AI really represents. Not a panic move, not a branding exercise, and definitely not a “we suddenly discovered AI” story but the next logical step in a journey that has been building for years. AI didn’t change who we are. It simply made the missing piece visible and accelerated everything.

And yes, it was intense. Running a profitable solutions business in a down market, while simultaneously doing a corporate split, building a new platform company, raising funding, and helping to kickstart Drupal AI… that’s not a comfortable path. But comfort was never the goal. Relevance, autonomy, and impact were.

What gives me confidence going into 2026 is not that we “figured it all out” we didn’t. It’s that we proved a few things to ourselves:

• We can move fast without abandoning quality.
• We can build on open source while keeping it commercially viable.
• We can attract aligned investors and partners who understand long-term value.
• And we can ship real AI value to customers, not just talk about it.

If there’s one principle I want to end this chapter with, it’s the one I keep coming back to: the table in heaven. In difficult times, it’s easy to become defensive, territorial, or overly competitive. But I believe the only sustainable way forward for companies, communities, and continents is to keep choosing the long chopsticks mindset: feed each other.

So that’s my commitment, as we head into the next chapter: to keep feeding customers with better outcomes, feeding partners with enablement, feeding the Drupal ecosystem with investment and innovation, feeding our team with purpose and growth, and feeding investors with discipline and transparency. And in return, I trust that same ecosystem will keep feeding back, because that’s what strong communities do.

We dared to Drop in Solid :)

Now we ride. 

If you’ve been following along, thank you. And if you’re in this storm too: you’re not alone.

Let’s go through it. Together. Ride with us.