Aiir Innovations

"The most beautiful part of the whole thing is when we started the project we didn't really know each other, but slowly we've grown up together." It's a remark that you might expect to hear in a scene from one of your favourite movies, or perhaps in a confession from a colleague on a team-building day. But it's actually how AI tech startup Aiir Innovation's CEO Bart Vredebregt explains how five AI students and an AI professor came together to launch a business that could revolutionise the maintenance industry. It all started in 2015, when Dutch airline KLM invited students on the University of Amsterdam AI master's degree programme to work on a project to automate the inspection of their jet engines. When done manually, this inspection requires an engineer to put a camera called a borescope into the engine after removing the aircraft's wing.