Four years ago, we — Frederik Mattwich and Keesiu Wong — met at the Technical University of Munich. While designing novel AI applications together as part of our studies (requiring many all-nighters and unlimited pizza), we quickly realised a shared passion for artificial intelligence and the great opportunity it offered to solve a host of important issues. We made it our mission to solve these, and so we decided to create a company dedicated to using AI in radically innovative ways and called it Design AI. We combined concepts from classical IT consulting, Design Thinking agencies and applied research companies.
Looking back, we are proud to say: it worked. We quickly became profitable, grew to about 20 people and our team engineered viable solutions for numerous sectors including media, retail, HR, security, sales, communications, construction and FMCG. We created multiple state-of-the-art solutions for application in defence. We 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. We are pleased that our hard work was recognised — last year we were awarded the European Defence Agency’s Defence Innovation Prize 2021.
Out of all our projects, we were most fascinated by our work in defence. We 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 — and we enjoy a challenge. Most importantly, we want to do our 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.
We see Helsing, with its drive for global technology leadership in AI-based defence solutions, as the ideal partner to fully utilise our 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. Our mission at Design AI was ambitious and simple: to design the future through AI, acknowledging its general-purpose potential to solve various industry problems. We created a home for highly talented people with a deep technical understanding and the human-centric mindset to develop great software solutions. In Helsing, we’ve found a new home for those aspirations, and we look forward to building cutting-edge AI for the defence of our democracies.
If you share our passion for AI and believe that democratic values are worth protecting, join our mission: https://jobs.lever.co/Helsing
