Hans Kornmann

Founder & CEO Divitel

Last Reviewed: September 19, 2026

Executive Summary

Hans Kornmann is the founder and chief executive of Divitel, a Dutch deep-tech company he started in 1997 and has led ever since. Divitel works with telecom operators and media companies on the unglamorous but load-bearing part of television: keeping video and broadband services running once they have been sold. The company’s positioning rests on being vendor-independent — it integrates and operates other people’s platforms rather than selling its own head-end — and it has layered its own observability product, MindRelay, on top of that integration work. By Divitel’s own account it has served more than fifty operators across four continents, and it describes Kornmann as a cable engineer by background with roughly thirty years in video and network engineering.

Career Highlights

• Founded Divitel in 1997 in Apeldoorn, the Netherlands, and has served as its chief executive throughout.
• Built the company around a vendor-independent model: strategy consulting, end-to-end systems integration, managed services, and the MindRelay observability platform.
• Opened what Divitel announced in November 2017 as Europe’s first automated TV and video application lifecycle test lab.
• Took the company through ISO 27001 information-security accreditation in December 2018, alongside its existing ISO 9001 certification.
• Opened a Latin American satellite office in Colombia in September 2023.
• Acquired the Dimetis BOSS Broadcast Manager product line and opened a German engineering location in September 2026.
• Interviewed by the ELITE network, the international scale-up programme, about how Divitel has grown and what he has learned running it.

Professional Journey

Kornmann started Divitel in 1997. Divitel’s own description of its origins is unusually specific about where the company came from: it was “founded in 1997 by Hans Kornmann, a Dutch cable engineer with a passion for flawless video delivery.” That engineering starting point still shapes the business. Divitel does not sell encoders, packagers or set-top platforms of its own; it takes the position that operators are better served by a partner with no vendor allegiance, and makes its living integrating, monitoring and operating whatever mix of systems a given operator has ended up with.

The company’s public record over the last decade reads as a steady widening of that base rather than a change of direction. In 2017 Divitel opened an automated test lab for TV and video applications, which it billed as the first of its kind in Europe, and was awarded a patent for two-way audio-visual accessibility technology. Information-security accreditation to ISO 27001 followed in December 2018 — a practical requirement for a firm asking operators to let it inside their production video chain. The company moved to new premises in Apeldoorn in January 2023 and opened a satellite office in Colombia that September, its first push into Latin America. In September 2024 it joined the DAVID project, applying AI in smart-home contexts under a regional innovation grant.

The most significant recent move came in September 2026, when Divitel acquired the Dimetis BOSS Broadcast Manager product line and simultaneously opened an engineering location in Germany — a step from pure integration towards owning software assets of its own, consistent with the direction MindRelay had already set. Divitel’s investor page describes the company as Series A and gives no further funding detail.

In interviews Kornmann has talked less about technology than about the mechanics of staying solvent. He has said that cash flow matters more to an organisation’s survival than profitability on paper — that having enough to meet payroll and fixed costs is the test — and that crises tend to carry opportunities inside them. His stated motto, “change to stay the same,” is a reasonable summary of a company that has spent nearly thirty years in the same niche by continually rebuilding what it does inside it.

What he did before 1997 is less well established. Aggregator profiles place him as General Manager at Hutronic B.V. and as a Division Manager at ITESS B.V. until the year he founded Divitel, but neither role is corroborated by any primary source, and Divitel’s own material is silent on his career before the company existed.

Education

No education record was found. Divitel’s own pages, the ELITE network interview and third-party profiles all describe Kornmann as a Dutch cable engineer with around thirty years in the field, but none names an institution, a degree or a field of study. The field is left empty rather than inferred from the “engineer” description.