What was the inspiration behind Nyckel and how did the company come to be?

Sure. My co-founder Dan and I come from different backgrounds. He's a software engineer, and I am an AI researcher and engineer. He was building a website called What's That Charge, which is Urban Dictionary for credit card statements. He was like, "I just need to classify these pieces of text. Is this a charge or not?" He was frustrated by the lack of an API for that. There were APIs that were pre-trained. But that would typically be this generic spam, generic offensive text, or content moderation. That's not what he wanted because this is a credit card statement, so it's a very specific structure. 

Then, there was the whole go-to-Amazon SageMaker and build your whole MLOps-pipeline-from-scratch issue. He thought that there should be a simpler solution for this where the API layer is exactly the data layer. You just provide the desired inputs and outputs, and then, everything happens behind the scene. You call with new inputs and you get the predictions. 

From my perspective, every time I do a new AI project, I’ve to do the same thing, start building the whole pipeline from scratch—the annotation, the training, the data engine, the infrastructure, elastic, and deploy. I got tired of doing it every time and wanted to see if I could build it in a very general way so as to do it once and do it right. That's how Nyckel started.