Founded in 2017 in the Netherlands, on an unfashionable premise: do the research first, and let companies happen to it.DKAI Lab was founded in 2017, in the Netherlands, on an unfashionable premise: do the research first, and let companies happen to it — not the other way around.
The first public act was the viral capsule-networks implementation. Two research lines later held for good: the EarthScan lineage (2020→2023) and HOMINIS → RealAI (2024). The lab stays small, independent, upstream of both.
The first public act was code: a TensorFlow implementation of capsule networks, online within days of the paper, that went viral and put a two-person Dutch outfit on the research map. The years after were spent where attention wasn't — activation functions, neuroscience-inspired learning rules, microscopy vision, and the stubborn problem of making seismic models survive contact with new basins.
Two of those lines held. EarthAdaptNet became VeerNet became EarthScan, an independent company reading the subsurface across 8,500+ wells. Project HOMINIS — Europe's first human-centered LLM, trained on the Leonardo supercomputer — became RealAI. The lab remains what it was: small, independent, upstream of both.
