04.06.2026
Bringing AI-powered online possibilities to every entrepreneur
Getting an online business off the ground is becoming fundamentally easier. The technology is ready, and the people who know how to bring its possibilities within reach of every entrepreneur are joining Your.Online.
Joost de Valk and Marieke van de Rakt built their careers around exactly that mission. At Yoast, they turned SEO, one of the most specialist-driven disciplines on the web, into something millions of website owners could use confidently, without a technical background. The Yoast SEO plugin is active on more than 13 million websites worldwide. They did it by building a layer on top of complexity that translated it into clear, actionable guidance, and they did it at a scale that shaped an entire ecosystem.
With Progress Planner, the company they built after Yoast, they took on the next version of that challenge: helping website owners stay active, relevant, and successful with smart guidance built into the environment where they already work.
Today, Your.Online announces the acquisition of Progress Planner. Joost, Marieke, and their team join the group to lead the development of AI capabilities across its platform and to build the intelligence layer that will fundamentally expand what entrepreneurs can achieve on their own.
A shift full of new possibilities for entrepreneurs
AI is becoming the substrate of how digital products work. The interface between an entrepreneur and their online presence is changing at its core.
Capabilities that once required specialist expertise or outside help are increasingly guided, suggested, and realized through the right system at the right moment. The question shifts from “how do I do this” to “what do I want to achieve.” Expressing intent replaces navigating complexity.
For the millions of small and mid-sized businesses that form the backbone of the digital economy across Europe and the United States, this shift opens up possibilities that simply were out of reach before. The ambition and the ability to act on it are moving closer together.
Your.Online already operates at the start of that journey for millions of entrepreneurs, providing the domains, hosting, websites, and services around them. The next step is making that foundation intelligent: a layer that understands what entrepreneurs are trying to build and actively helps them get there.
The team that has done this before
Joost de Valk founded Yoast in 2010, after years of working as a digital marketing consultant on some of the largest SEO projects in the world. The Yoast SEO plugin started as a side project and became the defining tool for how websites optimize for search, used by millions of site owners who had never written a line of code.
Marieke van de Rakt co-founded Yoast and led it as CEO through a decade of growth and through its acquisition by Newfold Digital in 2021. She built Yoast Academy, which trained hundreds of thousands of people in SEO, and brought to the company a deep understanding of what it takes to make a technically complex discipline genuinely learnable for a non-expert audience.
Together, they built and sold one of the defining companies in the WordPress ecosystem. Their edge was understanding the gap between what technology could do and what entrepreneurs could actually use and closing it. That is precisely the opportunity in front of them now, at a much larger scale.
After Yoast, they founded Emilia Capital and began investing in and advising product companies across the open-source and WordPress community. Progress Planner grew from that period as their own product, built by a team of developers and community leaders who have spent years embedded in the ecosystems where their work will now have the most impact.
Building toward something meaningful
What begins today is a focused, deliberate development of capabilities built into the platforms entrepreneurs already use, close to real customer environments, tested against real usage, and refined based on what actually works.
To lead this, Your.Online has established an AI Growth-team, with Joost as Group Head of AI & Growth and Marieke as Group Head of Brand & Community, working across all brands within the group.
The ambition is to change the experience of getting online and growing an online business. From idea to outcome, with the right intelligence available at every step along the way.
“We spent years at Yoast watching people struggle with things that should just work. SEO felt impossible until it didn’t. We genuinely believe AI can do the same thing for the whole experience of building a business online. That’s a problem worth spending the next chapter on, and Your.Online gives us the reach to actually make a dent.”
Joost de Valk & Marieke van de Rakt
What excites us most is what we can build together. This is the beginning of a shared chapter, one that we believe will open online possibilities for entrepreneurs that did not exist before. The full thinking behind it is captured in From enablement to intelligence: the next phase of AI within Your.Online, for anyone who wants to understand where this is going and why.