The Lab
Why we exist, how we fund ourselves and what we create.
The problem we exist to address
Most AI is built to maximise convenience, automation and, eventually, dependence. The market treats that dependence as a feature: proprietary models, opaque pipelines, undocumented choices, systems no one inside the organisation understands, and the unspoken assumption that the supplier must stay to keep it all running.
For organisations working in climate, democracy, healthcare and education, this is more than an inconvenience. They need advanced technology and must also be able to explain what they use, adapt it and take responsibility for it. Losing control is not an option.
Our answer
Everything we do follows one principle: the organisation we help should be stronger when we leave than when we arrived. There is a simple way to test that: what can the team do without us afterwards?
We are self-funded. No venture capital, no outside investors and no one to answer to but ourselves and the organisations we work with. That is a deliberate choice. It lets us reject the wrong incentives and choose work for its value, not simply for the revenue it can generate.
AI is not neutral. Neither are we.
Why a lab
The challenges we take on rarely fit within one discipline. They require systems thinking to understand where to intervene, mathematics to know what to measure, design to make the result usable and engineering to build it.
Almost no organisation keeps all four in-house. Neither do we: we are a small team. What a lab can do is bring together people who work across disciplines, then add specialist depth when a problem calls for expertise we do not have ourselves.
What comes out of it
Work that remains useful after a project ends: frameworks that keep us from starting at zero next time, and public tools built on them. Some grow out of client work when a problem proves larger than one organisation. Others we build on our own time.
Explore our open tools →Read our insights →
Who we are
A small permanent team. For each challenge, we bring in people who know what we do not. We designed the lab that way on purpose.
Khaled TamimyFounder · CEO
Pim MeerdinkCo-founder · CFO
Paul LodderCo-founder · CTO