Who is Karl-Gustav?

I'm Karl-Gustav from Estonia 🇪🇪 — 1.3 million people, more startups per capita than almost anywhere. I got hooked on finance at 13, reading economics books and making my first investments. Not for the returns — I wanted to understand how capital moves and what makes companies work.

That led me to study economics at university, where my bachelor's thesis was a profitable trading strategy using derivatives on the S&P index fund. I sometimes wish I'd started coding earlier, but thinking in terms of markets and incentives shapes how I approach building software.

I did my master's in Computer Science at the University of Tartu, focused on making AI systems more transparent. My thesis was on Explainable AI.

I started my career at Wise on the Speed team — the one responsible for getting transfers through in under 20 seconds. Later I moved to AML, building systems to keep money transfers compliant without slowing them down.

At Seldon, I worked on their ML platform — making it easier to deploy and monitor models in production. At Papercup, I worked on AI-generated voices and learned that getting to 50% accuracy is the easy part; the last 30% is where all the real work lives.

Most recently, I was a Founder in Residence at Entrepreneur First. That's where I went from "I want to start something" to actually doing it.

I want to build something that reaches millions of people. If that sounds like your kind of problem too, let's talk.

Outside of work: reading, music, and long walks — seriously underrated. You might also catch me sending memes at 1 AM right after squashing a tricky bug.