Meet the founders:
Nic Windley
Entrepreneur and systems strategist focused on the future of intelligent infrastructure.
Building on insights from his MBA research into artificial intelligence and background in electronics, Nic helped redefine the direction of the technology from an experimental SDK into a broader Synthetic Intelligence platform.
He leads company strategy, partnerships, and the long-term platform vision.
Des Atkins
Systems architect and engineer focused on building the foundations of Synthetic Intelligence.
His work spans real-time simulation, emergent system behaviour, and performance-sensitive runtime environments.
Des is responsible for the engineering direction and technical implementation of the Qognetix substrate.
How Qognetix Started
The origins of Qognetix trace back to early experimental work by Des Atkins exploring biologically inspired neuron architectures and signal-driven computational systems.
Through this work Des developed an initial neuron model and SDK investigating how persistent signal dynamics could produce complex behaviour in software.
When Nic Windley encountered these experiments, he recognised that the underlying approach pointed toward something much larger than a research tool. Drawing on his research into artificial intelligence during his MBA, Nic saw the potential for a new class of intelligent systems built around persistent signal substrates rather than traditional model-based inference.
Working together, the founders refined the early neuron architecture to reproduce biologically plausible spiking behaviour consistent with canonical Hodgkin–Huxley models and broader mammalian spike dynamics.
This work demonstrated that signal-driven substrates could support stable, stateful computational systems over time.
Qognetix was created to develop this discovery into a structured Synthetic Intelligence platform capable of supporting governed intelligent systems operating within real-world infrastructure.
Join Us
We are currently hiring founding engineers and testers to help build the first generation of the Synthetic Intelligence platform. Read more about joining Qognetix here.