Heiko Altrichter: An AI entrepreneur

My name is Heiko Altrichter, and I’m the co-founder and head of product development at Laxford. We develop specialised artificial intelligences for applications in the finance sector. We’re building deep learning networks that can make good decisions in uncertain environments.

Back when we started out in 2017, we were looking at the finance sector and found something very interesting. Nine out of 10 money managers underperformed the public sector. Why is that? After talking with many hedge fund managers and portfolio advisors around the globe, we figured out that most investment decisions are ultimately driven by human bias not through data. There’s simply so much data out there, so many millions of market participants, it’s impossible to consider them all and to weight them all.

The company that I co-founded is in various places in the world. We have offices in Dubai and Mexico and Cayman Islands and in Berlin. Out of Berlin, we have created an AI and research laboratory where we create neural networks trying to make good decisions in imperfect environments. In Dubai, we have built up a non-profit development bureau that tries to bring digital learning to developing countries. We are starting out in Venezuela where we provide a digital learning infrastructure for Venezuelan schools and provide them with online payment gateways that help them mitigate the risks that come with hyperinflation.

Cambridge University has been instrumental in showing us how to take our research out of academia and into entrepreneurship.