Why Silent Customers Are the Most Expensive

The Amsterdam-based company Churned develops software that learns to read this silence. The platform analyzes behavioral data from thousands of customers and predicts who is about to leave. This is not based on gut feeling, but on patterns that a human would never see.

But Churned goes beyond just predicting. The AI also directly determines the best action for that specific customer to prevent churn, so teams not only know who is at risk but also what they need to do today to change that.

Churned helps subscription companies, such as energy providers (for example, Budget Thuis and Vandebron), gyms like Trainmore, and media companies and publishers such as het Financieel Dagblad and RTL. 

Two brothers, different enough to build together

Maarten and Michiel Doornenbal grew up in a small village ten minutes from Amsterdam. As children, they didn’t get along very well.

"When we were young, we didn’t expect to have a company together. I wasn’t very nice to Michiel when we were small."
— Maarten Doornenbal [1]

Later that changed. They both went to study, both lived in Amsterdam, but in different houses. The distance helped. And once the bond was back, something else appeared. They complemented each other. Maarten is the extrovert, the commercial side. Michiel is the data scientist, quieter, more in the background. They don't get in each other's way.

"It’s good that we are completely different. When starting a company as brothers, you don’t want to be too much in each other’s space."
— Michiel Doornenbal [1]

The idea for Churned came from Michiel’s master thesis. During his data science studies, he researched whether machine learning can predict which customers will cancel. The answer was yes. His professor Francisco Blasques saw potential. In 2020, they founded the company together with Maarten.

The pattern no one expects

In many subscription companies, churn only becomes visible at renewal or cancellation, and by then, it’s usually too late.

There are teams that do try to look ahead. But this often happens with self-made, gut-based health scores, if they do anything at all. And if there are predictive models, they often come from data science teams in terms that are difficult to translate into the day-to-day work of marketing and customer teams.

Churned bridges that gap. It is a predictive retention platform that not only predicts who is at risk but also indicates the best action to prevent churn for that specific customer. Thus, complex intelligence becomes immediately practical and directly actionable.

Machine learning works differently than classical analyses. It looks for connections that a human would not think of. And sometimes those connections are counterintuitive.

"It’s not always true that more product usage is better. What we often see is that just before the moment of churn, usage actually increases. That is unexpected behavior."
— Michiel Doornenbal [1]

A customer who suddenly logs in much more frequently than normal may not be enthusiastically engaged. Maybe he is exporting his data. Maybe he is looking for a way to downgrade his subscription. The pattern is the same, the meaning is different. Churned trains models to see that difference.
At B2C companies, this translates into behaviors such as comparing rates, adjusting contract options, or more frequently viewing cancellation pages.

The market where people are too expensive

In September 2024, Churned raised 2.5 million euros in a round led by Newion and Volta Ventures. [2] The money goes towards international growth and further development of the platform.

The strategic focus is clear. Churned targets what they call high-volume, low-margin subscription markets. Think of streaming services, publishers, e-commerce with recurring payments. In these markets, margins are thin, and human intervention per individual customer is simply too expensive.

Patrick Polak of Newion states that Churned's technology replaces rule-based systems with AI, specifically aimed at companies with large customer bases where every percent of churn counts. [2]

The calculation is simple. A reduction in churn by one percent can increase a company's profitability by five to fifteen percent. [3] That sounds abstract, but for a company with tens of thousands of subscribers, it's the difference between growth and stagnation.

At Uptrends, a Dutch SaaS client of Churned, the platform led to a twenty percent reduction in annual churn and a seventy-four percent decrease in revenue loss due to cancellations. [4]

The human remains necessary

Maarten doesn’t see AI as a replacement for the customer success manager. Rather, as a collaboration between different types of intelligence. A predictive model that tells which customers are at risk. A prescriptive model that advises which action to take. And soon, generative AI that executes the action.

But the strategy, the playbooks, the relationship with the customer. That remains human work. The AI does the heavy calculations, the human sets the course.

"It still needs humans to create the playbooks and come up with new actions. The AI model can then look at everything you’ve done and see what worked best."
— Michiel Doornenbal [1]

The boring problem as a goldmine

While the world is fixated on generative AI and the latest chatbots, Churned is building something that rarely makes the front pages. Predicting customer churn doesn’t sound spectacular. No one posts about it on LinkedIn. But it is a problem that costs the subscription industry billions each year.

That’s where the lesson lies for the Dutch startup scene. The most defensible positions are often not in the hype, but in the infrastructure underneath. In the specific, measurable problems that keep big companies awake. Churned doesn’t compete with OpenAI. They compete with Excel sheets and gut feeling. And that’s a contest you can win.

Two brothers who couldn’t get along as kids. A professor who saw a master thesis and thought: there’s a company in this. An insight that silence doesn’t mean satisfaction. Five years later, that idea raises millions and is growing into Scandinavia and the United Kingdom.

Not every revolution makes noise.

Willem Blom
Founder Dutchstartup.ai