Joop van Gent is the founder and CEO of Irion Technologies, a language technology based software company in the Netherlands. Joop has his roots in language philosophy, which he studied in Nijmegen, the Netherlands, in the 70s and 80s. After his degree in 1984 he worked for several years at the University of Tilburg, both as a software designer and language technology engineer. In 1992 he left the academic world to start working for Europe's second largest commercial independent research organisation, TNO, where he founded the Department of Multimedia Technology, and managed it for about nine years. In 2000 Joop left TNO to start Irion, with technology from TNO, and financially supported by TNO, digital lexicon publisher Van Dale and three venture capital companies. Now Irion is one of the key players in language technology solutions in the Netherlands.