Xavier Damman

Xavier Damman is a Belgian entrepreneur and computer-science engineer. He was an early Twitter user (2006) and, recognizing that valuable content on the platform was buried in noise, moved to San Francisco in 2009 to build Storify — a tool that let users assemble stories from social-media content (tweets, YouTube, photos). Storify was used by publishers and organizations including CNN, The New York Times, The Washington Post, the BBC, TED, the United Nations and the White House, and was named one of TIME magazine's 50 best websites of 2011. Livefyre acquired Storify in 2013; the product later passed to Adobe (via Adobe's 2016 acquisition of Livefyre) and was shut down in 2018. Damman studied at the Catholic University of Louvain (UCLouvain) and the Polytechnic University of Madrid.

In May 2015 Damman co-founded Open Collective with Pia Mancini, a platform that lets communities collect and disburse money in full transparency — without each group having to incorporate or open its own bank account. He raised an initial round of roughly $500k in October 2015. Open Collective became widely used by open-source projects, mutual-aid groups and community collectives, and Damman has continued to steer it toward a "digital cooperatives" model, sending regular investor updates (e.g., an "Open Collective Investors Update, Spring 2025").

In 2016 Damman was named to MIT Technology Review's "Innovators Under 35" list for Belgium. He has also appeared as a World Economic Forum contributor and a speaker at events such as Crowdsourcing Week.

More recently, Damman has relocated his focus to Brussels, describing himself as a "citizen, dad, entrepreneur, commoner, regen." He co-founded AllForClimate.earth, launched grassroots pandemic-era projects (Citizen Garden, Citizen Bike Garden), and now builds and funds civic/regenerative tooling including DAO.Brussels (Web3 tools for participatory city governance), Citizen Spring and Citizen Wallet (an open-source wallet for community tokens). He organizes the "Regens Unite" gatherings for people working on regenerative solutions.

• Backs early-stage, mission-driven and regenerative initiatives rather than a conventional venture portfolio — his own site describes him as an "angel investor in regenerative initiatives."
• Primary funding focus: cooperatives and digital cooperatives (DAOs) that "contribute to the commons," especially in the Brussels Bioregion.
• Thesis rooted in a stated belief in "transitioning from top-down hierarchies to decentralized networks focused on community wellbeing and regeneration" — technology should empower citizens and communities beyond traditional employment.
• As an operator-investor, he favors open-source, transparency and community ownership (the core ethos of Open Collective) — likely to resonate with founders building public-goods, civic-tech, cooperative or climate-focused ventures.