Your decision to co-found byteLAKE speaks of your entrepreneurial spirit. What opportunities did you see in founding it?

I noticed that digital transformation and AI solutions are transforming industries as we see it today. I fully support what Andrew Ng stated, that “AI is the new electricity”. AI is a game changer for many industries, so we decided to leverage some of those opportunities and also build our own products along the way. That´s when I, together with Mariusz Kolanko, decided to co-found byteLAKE. The main approach of byteLAKE is building intelligent software and hardware solutions that enable our customers to become more efficient and also increase their competitiveness in markets.

What are some examples of your products that offer these solutions?

Brainello, which is owned by byteLAKE, is a tool that uses machine learning to extract crucial information from documents. It speeds up customers´ execution of routine tasks and even eliminates some routine jobs from office work. It speeds up document processing and invoice handling. It uses all those tricks from machine learning, so it actually reads the invoices in human-like fashion and extracts things like VAT ID, net values, due dates, and so forth. This is one of the solutions that we have already integrated to for one of our customers in Poland, Bpower2 namely, and they´re using it successfully as part of their product. In fact, Brainello helped the Bpower2 team improve the performance of their finance team by 7 times!

When did you release Brainello?

We released it earlier this year, the first version was released in June, but right now we are working extensively on version two of Brainello and that will be even more exciting. Currently, Brainello is using machine learning to extract data, but we want to make it more intelligent to learn over time. We are right now working on an AI module but we´ll basically work in the background, it will be like supervised learning, it will learn from the users. Imagine, when you alter or fix something manually in an invoice of poor quality, Brainello will learn it for itself, so the next time you have an invoice of poor quality, it will basically fix that part.

The fact that you’re working with Lenovo at the AI Summit in San Francisco speaks a lot about your company, you are working with giants. How important are these collaborations for you?

It is very important for us. We position ourselves as a company to come to when you´re looking for innovation and inspiration, and most importantly, when you want to build the impossible with AI. Another expertise we specialize in is High Performance Computing (HPC). To achieve that, we are building the company around the model where we very much collaborate with universities as well. Some of our engineers, including our CTO, on purpose keep one foot in university so they can continue their research work. So we very much support them in continuing their research career. We don´t want to position ourselves as a typical company just focused on business, we mix business and also want to benefit from all those “crazy researchers” in the universities. And that has already paid off. Some of our people are quite popular in Google scholar for example, you can find their names there when publishing very innovative solutions or mathematical algorithms to the communities and are cited by well-established business journals. Talking about partnerships, we have Lenovo, Basler, Brainello, Bpower2, these are all partners that we want to go hand in hand with.

Speaking of this collaborative environment, this also speaks about the future of Wroclaw as well. You´ve spent some time in Silicon Valley, you know how competitive the market there is, you´ve seen how business driven it is there. What have you learned from your experience in the US and how important is it as a market for you?

The US market, alongside the European market, is very important for us. We´ve applied the things we´ve learned to our business practices, for instance, we´re a totally flat organization so we don´t have all those layers of business management.. Whenever we put a person in front of the customer, we give them accountability that they are in charge so that if they make a deal, then it´s a deal. We want to be really fast, but then we also try to attract best talents to our company so that when we come up with a solution, it really is a “wow” solution. We´re a young company but we´re starting to get good feedback from our clients. These are the things I´ve learned from Silicon Valley and also while working with customers from Scandinavia or Western Europe. We don´t want to be the company that people come to for outsourced teams, we want to be a company where people come for looking for inspiration, innovation, and want to build the impossible with AI or HPC.

Looking into the future, how do you see byteLAKE over the next 3-5 years?

We want to always evolve with every new invention. First of all, we want to expand beyond the European market. Second, we want to make our products successful. Brainello, currently, is now integrated into BPower2 which is a workflow ERP management system that actually also originated from Wroclaw. We want to bring Brainello to other products in the US market and to Western Europe. With federated learning (AI to IoT), we believe that is the solution that will put us at the edge of innovation and that´s how we want to be perceived. In 3-5 years I want to hear that byteLAKE people are truly state-of-the-art guys, and if you want to do the impossible, go to byteLAKE.