14.06.2022 - Design AI’s deep-tech start-up team comes with an impressive track record in delivering machine learning solutions across industry sectors, including the defence domain. Now the gate-startup is joining Helsing where they will continue to serve the partners and trusted relationships built over the last years, benefitting from their own excellent mission planning experience and Helsing’s talent and technology resources.
How Design AI got into defence tech
Four years ago, Frederik Mattwich and Keesiu Wong met at the Technical University of Munich. While designing novel AI applications together as part of their studies (requiring many all-nighters and unlimited pizza), they quickly realised a shared passion for artificial intelligence and the great opportunity it offered to solve a host of important issues.
They made it their mission to solve these, and so they decided to create a company dedicated to using AI in radically innovative ways and called it Design AI. They combined concepts from classical IT consulting, Design Thinking agencies and applied research companies.
Looking back, they are proud to say: it worked:
- the gate-startup Design AI quickly became profitable
- grew to about 20 people
- their team engineered viable solutions for numerous sectors including media, retail, HR, security, sales, communications, construction and FMCG
- they created multiple state-of-the-art solutions for application in defence
- they developed first-of-its-kind path planning algorithms based on Graph Neural Networks; a superior video understanding engine based on multi-modal transformers, and as a mission planning AI that supports humans in their tactical decision-making based on Reinforcement Learning
- they are pleased that their hard work was recognised — last year Design AI was awarded the European Defence Agency’s Defence Innovation Prize 2021
Out of all their projects, they were most fascinated by the work in defence. They are convinced that developing AI solutions for defence industry has an immense potential to create value for our men and women in uniform. At the same time, it requires the highest technological standards across safety, robustness, efficiency, scalability, adaptiveness, and interpretability.
Most importantly, they want to do their part to ensure that democratic nations are at the forefront of this development. AI is being heavily researched and integrated into military applications globally and it is crucial to lead those developments to guarantee the safest, most responsible use of AI technology along with the highest ethical standards.
Why Design AI is joining Helsing
They see Helsing, with its drive for global technology leadership in AI-based defence solutions, as the ideal partner to fully utilise their expertise, especially in reinforcement learning and mission planning. Helsing has dedicated itself to building AI that is based on European ethical standards and NATOs principals of ethical uses of AI.
The mission at Design AI was ambitious and simple: to design the future through AI, acknowledging its general-purpose potential to solve various industry problems. They created a home for highly talented people with a deep technical understanding and the human-centric mindset to develop great software solutions.
In Helsing, they’ve found a new home for those aspirations, and they look forward to building cutting-edge AI for the defence of democracies.
Source: Hesling