2025 has definitely been a great year for I-care and its CEO. In December, the Mons-based company became Wallonia's second unicorn, after Odoo, meaning that its value now exceeds €1 billion. Its boss has just won the title of French-speaking Manager of the Year. In 20 years, this Dr House of industrial machinery has managed to establish his predictive maintenance company as a world leader and demonstrate that it is possible to produce very competitively in Belgium and Europe. He is also a deeply humane boss with firmly held values. 

Fabrice Brion beat Danny Roosens (Roosens Bétons), Nathalie Draux (Quality Assistance), Virginie Dufrasne (Lixon) and Yves Delatte (Sonaca), who were also in the running to become Manager of the Year 2025. The co-founder and CEO of I-care succeeds Laurent Louyet, CEO of the Louyet automotive distribution group. 

A story of friendship

I-care is definitely a great story that continues to unfold. It is first and foremost a story of friendship, as Fabrice Brion founded I-care in 2004 with his childhood friend Arnaud Stiévart, whom he met during his secondary school years in Saint-Ghislain. Both originally from the Borinage region, they decided to set up their own company after completing their studies. They took inspiration from Fabrice Brion's thesis, as an industrial engineer, on predictive maintenance and applied it to the real world. Twenty years later, the two friends remain close and prove that friendship and business are not always incompatible. Arnaud Stiévenart is still a shareholder and director of I-care.

 Fabrice Brion   Arnaud Stiévenart                   

Roots in Wallonia 

The company's history has been rooted in Wallonia since the very beginning, when the two friends launched their business in the attic of Fabrice's grandparents, Polish immigrants who came to work in the mines in Quaregnon. The company is still based in the region today, in the Initialis science park in Mons. Its motto? Roots and wings, explains Fabrice Brion to Trends-Tendances. ‘The roots are the Mons region, where we have our headquarters and where we produce our sensors. The wings are obviously our ambition, and our ambition has always been the whole world. Our solution works anywhere in the world.’

International reach

I-care now monitors hundreds of thousands of industrial machines around the world using cutting-edge technologies, including Wi-care vibration sensors. Its connected manufacturing facility can now produce up to 2,000 sensors per day, strengthening its ability to meet rapidly growing global demand. Its I-see™ platform, based on artificial intelligence, currently monitors more than 150,000 sensors to anticipate failures and optimise maintenance operations.

Figures that inspire dreams

I-care's success is based on numerous and substantial investments in research and development, strategic acquisitions, an easy-to-deploy system and a business model that is now highly profitable. Customers pay a monthly subscription per sensor, which includes the sensor, the receiver, access to the big data platform and diagnostics. The jury praised I-care's spectacular growth (30% per year), its eight international acquisitions in just a few years, and a staff turnover rate of less than 2% among its 1,000 employees as of last July. It had already won the title of Company of the Year in 2020. 

People and sustainability remain at the heart of the project

Beyond the figures, the jury also rewarded a boss who is ‘persevering, hard-working, innovative and deeply human’. Upon receiving this award, Fabrice Brion reiterated the importance of people in his company's vision: ‘We don't realise it, but in tech more than anywhere else, human talent is essential. Because these technologies, this software, our sensors, artificial intelligence, all of this has to be programmed, all of this has to be thought out. And so there are still sectors, even in tech, even in AI, where we create.’

A key player in Wallonia's digital ecosystem, I-care, which is expected to go public by 2027, confirms its leading role in digital innovation at the international level.

What is industrial predictive maintenance?

To put it simply, machines are like us and can sometimes break down. Since they cannot speak, tools must be developed to translate their language into symptoms so that they can be repaired. This is what I-care does with wireless monitoring solutions and artificial intelligence. A data-driven company that enables its customers to detect breakdowns sometimes months before they occur, thus saving them significant costs. A niche sector that also has a real impact in terms of sustainability, as it extends the life of machines.