Our story
It all started with a closed restaurant. Jean-Charles Vanderlinden had arranged a business lunch at a restaurant that the internet said was open. When he got there, the door was shut. It was not a one-off: what local businesses showed online was often wrong.
At the end of 2013, he put the idea to the test at the Microsoft Innovation Center Brussels' Boostcamp and won first prize. That settled it. In 2014, he and Pablo Castiel Gazier, who had met at Solvay Brussels School, founded CentralApp in Brussels. There was no software at first: we corrected each business's information by hand, wherever it appeared, and advised entrepreneurs on how to be found locally. The founders of Skynet, Keytrade and Ogone then backed us as business angels to turn that work into a platform.
The platform revealed a second problem. A business could be right everywhere online and still have a website that said something else. So we began building websites that stay in sync with the rest of a business's online presence. Software alone proved hard to distribute, so we became a web agency: our team builds each website and maintains it, as a concierge service. The platform became a mostly internal tool. Because every website runs on it, each improvement reaches every customer at once.
Today, more than 5,000 businesses across Europe have their website or page with Stride, with France, Belgium, Italy and Spain as our main markets. Building and maintaining each of those sites taught us what a local business needs from its website.
We put that experience into the platform and opened it to entrepreneurs: they can now build their website and run it on their own. Our team is there whenever they want, to build, maintain, help and advise. We believe people remain key: a platform without support is made for developers, not for entrepreneurs. An open platform with a team behind it: that is how, at the end of October 2026, CentralApp becomes Stride.
