How we ended up building Urgentis

4:47 a.m.

Saint-Pierre, ER waiting room. About twenty people seated, standing, lying against the wall. An LED screen displayed numbers that hadn't changed in forty minutes. A father rocked his feverish son. A woman next to me had set her bag on the floor so she wouldn't have to keep holding it. No one was talking, except the noise of a door opening every twelve minutes to let an exhausted caregiver out.

And then, that moment we all know: you look at the number you're holding. Then the screen. Then the time. Then the number again. You do the mental math — how many are left before me? How many minutes per patient? And no one to answer. Not the staff — they don't have the time. Not the screen — it doesn't know. Not the app — it doesn't exist.

It was that night that I thought of Urgentis. Without the name. Without the SaaS idea. Just the brute desire that something exist somewhere.

The coffee that started it all

A few weeks later, I told Ismail about that night in a café near Brussels-South station. He has been working on the public sector's digital transformation in Brussels for years — he knows Schaerbeek, Anderlecht, the desks, the mayors, the agents. He listens to me. And after five minutes, he says the sentence that changes everything:

"It's exactly the same problem in the municipalities. And in the health funds. And in the banks. It's not a hospital thing. It's a humanity thing, actually."

That day, we took notes on a paper napkin. I recently found the photo on my phone. You can see a rectangular box drawn with "ticket" written inside, an arrow coming out of it, and three circles: health, public, private. ONE TOOL FOR EVERYONE.

The three months we tore everything down

I had already started a prototype. A UI that copied Qmatic, but prettier. It was bad. Not because it was poorly coded — because we had reasoned like a "modern Qmatic". And Qmatic had built its product to sell kiosks, not to serve humans.

Ismail drew a line on the whiteboard: on the left, "Qmatic-like" — kiosks, proprietary screens, six-figure contracts, six-month rollouts. On the right, what we wanted: cloud-native, zero hardware, transparent pricing, 48-hour rollout. In the middle, a red line: "Anything that touches both sides at once is a trap."

We threw away three months of code. Started over. This time, we did the opposite of everything our competitors did. No kiosk? A QR code at the entrance. No proprietary screen? The waiting-room TV will do. No 5-year contract? A 30-day pilot, free to stop. It was terrifying. It was right.

The story behind the name

"Urgentis" was the internal codename for "hospital ER". When we expanded to other sectors, we figured we'd change it. We spent two whole evenings testing names: Atlas, Heron, Quill, Folio, Ridge, Quay… All ugly the moment you said them out loud in front of an alderperson.

At 11 p.m., tired, I said "Let's stick with Urgentis, it's Latin, it means 'that which presses', and that's exactly what we fix". Ismail nodded without looking up from his laptop. It stayed.

The lesson: names aren't found in meetings. They are validated in survival.

The night Schaerbeek said yes

We had pushed a personalised demo to a digital alderperson in Schaerbeek. The meeting was set for 8 p.m., because the town hall only closed at 7:30 p.m. and he wanted to show his team. At 9:17 p.m., a WhatsApp message from Ismail: "they're signing."

I was at a laundromat waiting for my sheets to dry. I sat down on the floor, back against a machine. I thought of the woman from Saint-Pierre who had set down her bag at 4 a.m. I wanted to call someone to share the news — and then I told myself it wasn't the moment. The moment would be in three months, when a citizen would gain 16 minutes at the desk without even knowing why.

What we learned

Three things we keep saying in demos:

1. The field lies less than pitches do. Everything we took for granted on slide 2 of the pitch deck was demolished on the first deployment. Staying close to the field is non-negotiable.
2. Constraints are gifts. No hardware, no GDPR-lite, no long rollout — every "no" imposed by Belgian BCE or by Smart Région SPW became a sales argument. The EU sovereignty constraint saved us on three deals.
3. Writing matters. A landing-page copy converts. A SMS-notification copy yells or soothes. An email copy makes a member come back, or lose them. We hired a narrator before a salesperson — and that was the right sequence.

What's next

Today, Urgentis runs as a pilot in two places. We're signing more in 2026. We have a roadmap covering 6 sectors and 3 years. But what I wanted to say at the start of this article is just this: if you're reading these lines thinking about a problem that keeps you awake at 4 a.m. — write to us. Not to buy. Not to sell. To talk. It's by far the most interesting part of the job.

— Rami Oulad Seghir Hajjaj