The company was founded in 2012 by a French entrepreneur and a Belgian developer and is expected to target sales of EUR 700,000 this year.Moblty may have been the much larger fish: the New Jersey-based company develops interactive screens for retail outlets, such as those in the US pharmacy chain CVS. Der Frankfurter ist erst 23 Jahre alt, gilt in der Szene als eine Art Wunderkind. The former Augustus managers have since described the start-up as huge fraud and accuse management of deceiving them. He started his career working at the intersection of machine learning and neuroscience, building algorithms that more closely mimic the human brain. If the company did not get into major difficulties by the end of last year, the purchase price may have been a multiple of the investment.In the meantime, Augustus declares that it is a tech company that is geared towards business customers and that is developing “continuous, vertically integrated solutions for artificial intelligence (AI)” that can be “applied to all industries”. One that also gathered prominent politicians and business people instead of experts. Because Weinberger is considered an AI prodigy, who worked for Google as a teenager and later worked on “empathic AI” in a developer laboratory of the Spanish telecommunications company Telefónica.The AI investor Fabian Westerheide knows Weinberger well. Der CDU-Politiker Amthor fungierte als Lobbyist für das KI-Startup Augustus Intelligence. That made its technology so secret that instead of expert venture capitalists, it was mainly old, wealthy families who invested there. “Pascal is energetic, visionary, intelligent and can inspire people,” says Westerheide. He also resigned from his “freelance work” at the White & Case law firm in order to “make himself politically not even more vulnerable”, as Amthor now told “Spiegel”. So far, the young politician has received between 1,000 and 3,500 euros per month from the law firm. Even his business partners don’t really understand what the technological core of the company founded in 2018 is.“They are extremely silent,” says one who dealt with Augustus. Augustus Intelligence company documents, which are available in the “Spiegel”, are intended to prove that there is a connection between White & Case and the US start-up. He currently serves as the Chief AI Officer and Co-Founder at Augustus Intelligence, where he is on a mission to democratise access to AI by building a platform that dramatically simplifies the process of creating models and scaling them.Pascal Weinberger, AI researcher and entrepreneur, discusses how we can use AI and machine learning innovations to better understand how the brain works. This is an impressive squad for a company that is barely two years old.
Party colleague Friedrich Merz accuses him of having “screwed up”, the left-wing politician Martina Renner even asks whether Augustus is the “cover company of a secret service”.The CDU member of the Bundestag is involved in a lobbying scandal.Haupt himself took care of the search for an agent thriller by surrounding himself with the former head of the Office for the Protection of the Constitution, Hans-Georg Maassen and ex-BND chief August Hanning. Termine von Augustus Intelligence im BMVI V o r b e m e r k u n g d e r F r a g e s t e l l e r Am 26. Subsequently, he worked with Numenta and then Google on a number of AI projects. There are already dozens of companies in this field.Haupt, who has no AI experience, is hardly known in the New York VC scene – even though he also has another start-up that sells suitcases. At the same time, however, Augustus is looking for a close link to the top of German politics – without it being obvious what it actually brings them.Secretness has been over since last week.