Foundation of the month: Aimino

08.06.2022 Daniela Musial-Lemberg Founder of the month

Our startup of the month is Aimino. They are just back from VivaTech in Paris, where they won the Start-up Pitch Contest of the French German Tech Lab as one of the most promising AI start-ups.

What does your company stand for?

At Aimino, we bring machine learning to real-world products and equip them with smart features.

Our focus is not just to provide high-performance AI systems to end users. Users can use our toolkit to generate synthetic data on demand, so they need to collect several orders of magnitude less data in reality. We observe a 90-99% reduction in data requirements compared to traditional vendors. Our automated data cleansing also significantly reduces human effort in machine learning projects.

Where and how did you come up with the bright idea to start the company?.

Our co-founder Tam did his PhD in artificial intelligence at Bosch and at the University of Freiburg. Afterwards, he was an AI researcher at Google AI responsible for various smart applications. He noticed that the data sets to be used for AI applications were mostly insufficient in quality and quantity. This was negatively reflected in the performance of the AI applications, as the data used is a fundamental pillar of these applications and largely determines their technical added value. With this fact and the potential solution to this issue using synthetic data, the fire to create it has been ignited.

How did the founding team come together?
The founding team has already met about 10 years ago during the then computer science studies at KIT.

Where do you see the hurdles in the founding process? Where did you get support?
The founding process including the administration are somewhat burdensome for founders. However, we have successfully mastered the challenges. We have benefited from the tips from various start-up funding programs, the KIT, our professor Tamim Asfour and our friends, successful founders.

What was one of your biggest challenges during the startup phase?
Such a steep learning curve in the startup was hard for us to imagine before. If we keep the demands on ourselves and our work constantly high, we can maintain the steep learning curve over a longer period in the startup.

Has Corona had an impact on your startup/industry so far and if so, what?

Corona also had an impact on our start up, whether it was the home office obligation or the cut in budget with our potential clients.

Which quality should you bring from your point of view as a founder?

Ambition, perseverance, a high frustration threshold and persistence.

Do you have any practical tips for other young entrepreneurs?.

Do not be afraid to implement your ideas and visions. Do not be discouraged by setbacks, because these are part of it. Learn from the setbacks and use them as an opportunity to grow from it. You will certainly have to make decisions during your activities that may change your direction dramatically. But this is also a normal process to find your product market fit and to be successful.

What would you perhaps do/approach differently from today’s perspective?.

We would focus more on value creation through artificial intelligence. Research should not be an end in itself. The transfer into real products and applications succeeds through a continuous focus on customer benefits in the end application.

What are your plans for the future? What are your next big milestones?

Our goal for the future is to continue to grow and help support the breakthrough of artificial intelligence in industry and society. Our next big milestone is to refine our software tool “Amelia” so that our customers can use our tool independently to generate synthetic data and clean data in an automated way.

Thank you for your answers!

Want to hear more? Then listen to our conversation in the current podcast episode of the foundation of the month!