A knowledge hub and a second brain for professionals and teams. That’s iki.ai. Founded by Ivan Ilin and Max Orlov, the startup joined the Startup Visa program and moved from Bali to the Northern Netherlands. ‘Groningen with its prominent universities and huge student community offers a unique opportunity to test our product, build the early adopters community and set us on the path for the growth stage.’
With NOM as facilitator, iki.ai is working on a digital platform and intelligent knowledge interface to provide individuals and companies with a workspace to store their knowledge and gain insights from it. Anything from useful links, PDFs, blog posts, tutorials, GitHub repos, to YouTube videos, etc. iki is by design searchable, self-organized and, most importantly, has a co-pilot to help you with any reasoning tasks based upon your knowledge. The most obvious use case is that you can ask questions to your data in natural language and get precise answers with references to sources. But that’s just the beginning, according to the founders.
From rocket science to artificial intelligence
Co-founder Ivan Ilin was actually working in a completely different industry when he came up with the idea for iki. 'I was working on designing trajectories for scientific spacecraft and telescopes, but I became hugely interested in Machine Learning and Natural Language Processing. I was working in a very specialized field and had very specialized knowledge, and I realized that that knowledge also limited me when I wanted to learn something completely new and different. Google can be a great resource for learning new skills, but only if you really know what you're looking for. And if you know very little about a subject, you obviously don't know what you're looking for.'
‘So I thought it would be cool if you had a search engine that uses natural language to help you get better results’, Ilin continues. ‘Something that could identify the gaps in your knowledge and recommend further reading. The idea is still the same, but when Max and I started iki in 2016, the product was entirely different. Back then, it was more about helping people with their career paths through individually tailored learning, but that product never really took off. And A.I. back then wasn’t where it is today, so we moved on to other things.’
Orlov and Ilin went on to found a Machine Learning consulting company that had some traction. And Ilin started working at SberDevices in Moscow. ‘I had the privilege of leading a wonderful team of incredibly talented engineers. We were working on an A.I. voice assistant for Sberbank, for example, using semantic search and vector search, things that are now considered the standard. And this was all before the recent ChatGPT hype. It was really cool to work at the cutting edge of a technological revolution.’
From Bali to the Netherlands
‘I left Russia in early 2022 and ended up living in Bali for a year’, Ilin says. ‘I quit my job and Max and I decided to give iki a second chance. But raising funds was difficult because we were Russian. And as much as I loved living in Bali, we knew that it also wasn’t the right ecosystem for a high-tech startup. So we were seeking a new place to call home and grow our business. The Netherlands seemed like a great choice, because of the open and modern culture of innovation and entrepreneurship. And everyone speaks English, so it’s much easier for us to do business here.’
The two founders applied for the Startup Visa program. ‘We met with different facilitators, but the NOM was by far the most communicative, proactive and straightforward in what they could offer us’, Ilin continues. ‘We’re very happy with the constant support of the different NOM departments and representatives. We’re very grateful to our program manager Fleur Mulder for always being around with some helpful tips, relevant events and invitations. And also NOM investment manager Ytsen van der Meer and Daan Verhorst for making VC and potential customer introductions that worked.’
Synergy
Ilin’s biggest lesson as an entrepreneur? ‘When I was working for an enterprise, I only had to focus on making a great product’, Ilin says. ‘But when you become an entrepreneur, there’s so much more you need to factor in and understand. Things like finding the right market, creating a business model, managing resources, hiring talented people with limited resources, things like that. You need to be really efficient, but also be very honest with yourself. If it doesn’t work, it doesn’t work. If your idea doesn’t generate traction and more users, it’s just not a good enough idea, no matter how good your product is technically.’
‘And another valuable lesson for me was learning to work with and listen to people with different mindsets’, Ilin continues. ‘Max is an amazing partner and very talented and creative. He also founded Ony, a creative agency working with really big brands like Pepsico and Samsung. But we’re two very different people. He’s an artist and has a completely different mindset and way of working. But instead of focusing on our differences, we learned to work together in a way that just creates this kind of synergy, which is really great.’
The future
As for the coming years, Ilin and Orlov have ambitious goals for iki. We want to become the number one global digital library for creative professionals and the handiest knowledge platform for businesses.’, Ilin says. ‘An evergreen wiki, and a true second brain with both memory and reasoning capabilities. The A.I. landscape has completely changed over the last year and we’re in a super exciting time right now, because all sorts of crazy applications will be possible, where A.I. can perfectly augment the way people learn.’
‘Groningen with its prominent universities and huge student community offers a unique opportunity to test our product, build the early adopters community and set us on the path for the growth stage’ Ilin continues. ‘Plus, we are raising a seed round to strengthen the team and start the B2B product tests. And of course we hope the local venture community will support us.’