Yulia and Jannik are co-founders of Neuralfinity - the AI platform for developers. Yulia was born in Ukraine, had an entrepreneurial experience from the student years. Jannik was born in Germany, he’s a self-taught developer with 16+ years  experience in programming. Together they create endless energy and complement each other perfectly in their work. 

Tell us about the founders behind the brand?  

Yulia: I have always had a dream and aspiration to become an entrepreneur. Since childhood, I admired my father and also wanted to be like him. In Kyiv, for some time, I had my own cupcake business. From here I have a love and experience for building a community and understanding how to find the key to make a client happy. With the onset of the war in Ukraine, I moved to Germany. Honestly, at first it was difficult to focus on  running a business, as my life changed in one day. I quickly realised that if I cry and grieve it will not help me or Ukraine in the future. So one of my superpowers is to find inner strength even in the most difficult situations.

Jannik: I have always been fascinated by unleashing technology to make it accessible for others and broaden the access to its benefits. While I was running a cleantech startup called “YourEnergy” in London, I first dipped my toes into deep learning (which we used for  some internal projects there) and realised it could have such a big transformative impact.

There’s always a lightbulb moment before the beginning of a new venture. What was  that moment for you?  

Jannik: There are just so many possible applications for many different AI models. Any one  of them could change the world for a specific group of people. But I realised, the key to  make the technology accessible is through the developers already building apps for those  user groups who have the domain expertise. At the same time, these developers lack AI expertise, data sets and other resources to train and operate models for their apps, but we can get around that by giving them access to state of the art models, trained on big  datasets to be valuable across domains and build easy to use APIs for different AI tasks. Like this, all of those thousands of apps that require strong AI models are suddenly viable  with just a few lines of code for the AI functionality.

Yulia: After Jannik told me about his idea to make AI accessible to everyone, I got excited about it. I already had a clear plan in my head on how we would do marketing activities, that we needed to build a community of developers. I came as a very important addition to the successful functioning of our startup. 

What are your responsibilities as a business owner?

Yulia: I am responsible for marketing, business development and operations. My duties require a lot of creative thinking, as I develop these areas with little or no financial resources. I like to try different options and see what works in the end.

Jannik: I am responsible for product and technology. I always follow the news of how the AI-market develops and introduce only the best and most relevant technologies into our startup. 

What does your business offer its target audience?

Yulia: We trained large language models in order to offer developers an easy-to-use API, with which they can create AI-powered applications and products. Using our API, developers spend hours instead of months for implementing AI in their product. So, what  kind of API am I talking about? We have launched beta version of text summarisation API  Magic-Summary. On the way to launch is text categorisation API. We have prototypes of  speech recognition, image classification models. Our end goal is that all these APIs can be combined with a few lines of code.

How do you set yourself apart from other businesses in your industry?

Yulia: In fact, we are creating a new market, but of course there are businesses that offer similar solutions in one way or another. We are constantly studying market trends and, most importantly, we ask for feedback from our customers. Our unique qualities are that  we do not have a limit on the length of texts for making summary. Our API does not require training data, can be used with any programming language and our business model is simple and transparent. Training of large language models requires a lot of electricity, we are proud to use 100% of renewable energy.  

Jannik: We have a major focus on developer experience. Our API is meant for developers with little to no previous AI exposure and is very easy to use. And our models are trained for production workloads and not just scientific experimenting.  

With all the success stories around entrepreneurship and how innovative people  have to be to take the leap. How do you think you’ve innovated your sector and why?

Jannik: There is so much technological progress in the deep learning world. We proudly train our own in-house models, so they fulfil customer needs perfectly and we have very strong influence on the training data used as well as the results for specific tasks. We  augment that by our own proprietary training pipeline which enables us to build world class  models with very low resources.  

What plans do you have for Neuralityover the next two years?

Yulia: We want to release a speech recognition model next year. We already have a prototype that shows very high accuracy. Before the release, we will raise a pre-seed round. We need more compute resources to make our products available to as many developers as possible. Of course we want to expand our team. Now we have a team of two people and to be honest, we are making such progress as a team of dozens of people in other companies. As I said earlier, we will release more AI APIs as text classification, image recognition, translation etc. 

What are your thoughts on automation and how it could impact our economy?

Jannik: We currently see more and more staff shortages across many industries, while the next wave of AI is allowing for unprecedented automation potential. Putting 1 + 1  together, this could open a lot of opportunities. Without using AI to make use of them, I think we would hit pretty strong growth limits in developed economies. Access to quality AI will soon be a very important aspect that will make or break an economies’ long term growth potential.

Is word of mouth working to your advantage?

Yulia: Yes! We are very happy about this and recently started hearing from customers that somebody’s friend is using our API, he was very happy with it and told his friend about us. This is a great indicator that we are on the right track. 

Describe your business in three words.

Yulia: We open horizons. Three words it is very short, but it explains well that we empower developers to build an AI apps and deliver great results for users. Thus, all consumers have new opportunities and horizons. 

Jannik: AI developer platform; those three words cover what we do, who we do it for and how they can get access.  

What’s the most important question entrepreneurs should be asking themselves?

Yulia: In my opinion the most important question is what kind of pain do you cover for your customer? Having a cool idea, material resources is good. But the most important thing is who you are doing this for and how you help your audience with your product. I think that when the founder has a clear answer to this, then the startup is burdened with success.