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How Sqills started

Sqills didn't start with a grand vision for the future of passenger travel. It started with two university students, Johan and Bart, taking on whatever IT work they could find in addition to their studies.

In 2002, they founded JB-IT, creatively named after their own initials. The work was mostly building websites and IT consultancy. Nothing glamorous, but it paid the bills and it kept growing. In fact, it grew faster than they expected, which became a problem when you're also supposed to show up to lectures and finish a degree.

That balancing act led them to NS HiSpeed (now NS International), the Dutch high-speed rail operator. It was a setup that worked for everyone: Johan and Bart could keep running their business while writing the thesis they needed to graduate. More importantly, it's where they met Alexander and Wouter, the two people who would become the other half of what Sqills would eventually be.

The four of them clicked. Alexander and Wouter were impressed enough by what Johan and Bart had built that they wanted in. JB-IT quietly became Sqills, and the team set up their headquarters in Enschede, close to the university, close to a pipeline of sharp, young IT talent.

A different kind of IT company

When the four founders started working together, they had a very clear idea of what Sqills should not be.

In the mid-2000s, most IT companies made their money selling hours. That model came with two problems they wanted no part of. First, it made the company dependent on business cycles. If the market slowed down, people had no work. Second, it tied the company to building bespoke software to whatever a customer happened to want, project by project. The founders saw a dead end. One that could scale without having to double headcount every time revenue grew.

So around 2007 - when most of the Dutch IT industry was still happily billing by the hour - Sqills went a different direction. They would build a standard product, not custom solutions. They would charge based on usage, so that when a customer did well, Sqills did well. And they would focus on long-term partnerships with fixed pricing, rather than chasing short-term contracts.

It was an unconventional bet at the time. SaaS was barely a word people used, and pay-per-use models in enterprise software were rare. But it meant Sqills was building something that could compound, a product that got better with every customer, not a service that reset to zero with every new project.

From Enschede to everywhere

For the first decade, Sqills grew steadily but quietly, building the product, proving the model, earning trust one operator at a time. Then things started to accelerate.

In 2014, Irish Rail became the largest customer Sqills had signed to date. It's a partnership that's still going strong over a decade later, which says something about the long-term approach the founders bet on back in 2007.

But the real turning point came in 2018, when Eurostar - the high-speed service connecting the UK, France, Belgium, the Netherlands and Germany - chose S3 Passenger. That was a statement. Not just because of the scale, but because an operator at that level trusted a company from Enschede with their core reservation system.

From there, the map started filling in fast. In 2020, VIA Rail Canada became the first customer outside of Europe, turning Sqills' global ambitions from a slide in a strategy deck into an actual contract. A year later, SNCF Voyageurs, one of the largest high-speed rail operators in the world, selected S3 Passenger to replace their existing reservation system. That same year, Sqills became fully owned by Siemens Mobility, a company with over 160 years in transport.

And then the implementation times started getting ridiculous. Spanish high-speed operator iryo went live in just twelve months in 2022. Swedish operator Snälltåget did it in two months in 2023 - the fastest implementation in Sqills history. And later that year, Brightline in Florida became the first US customer, going live within months and marking Sqills' first go-live in North America.

What started as two students building websites had become the software behind some of the world's biggest rail networks.