Unlocking humanity's potential through education and meaningful work
Solving the AI talent gap by teaching applied AI with real-world challenges
AI holds enormous potential to solve humanity's greatest problems. But at the moment, it's far from living up to that promise. There are not enough people who know how to apply AI in practice and purpose driven organizations can't find the ones that do, efficiently. We solve both of those problems by offering challenge-based AI education, developing and assessing talent based on their real-world skills. We develop a detailed understanding of their skills and abilities and personal preferences to find a perfect match between a talented individual and a company.
How do we achieve our vision of meaningful work?
We guide our members through a journey of remote and local in-person learning events, real-world AI application in 10 week challenges and personalized skill assessment & development orchestrated by the FruitPunch AI platform.
How did FruitPunch AI start?
During his university studies in the summer of 2018, FruitPunch AI founder Buster Franken wanted to join a program to learn how to apply AI, but couldn’t find any in his hometown. He gave it a think … What if he organized one? He got a community together with a group of his friends from university.
Looking for a way to do up real-world experience and make an impact, Buster put out a call to action to apply AI to solve problems related to the UN Sustainable Development Goals. The wildlife reserves of South Africa responded and weeks later Buster was in the bush in Pilanesberg, SA to see how AI could help in their fight against poachers. He knew he couldn’t do this alone so he recruited co-founder Sako and 50 AI engineers from around the globe to tackle the beast. Over the course of 10 weeks they worked closely together with the rangers to develop an autonomous drone with thermal cameras that could detect poachers in the wildlife reserves. The first AI for Good Challenge was born - AI for Wildlife.
Sako and Buster decided to scale this vision of teaching applied AI while making a real-world impact to a global community. All over the world FruitPunch AI came to the call of those, whose resources are scarce but mission true. We worked with medical centers of Europe to automate the detection of covid, the marine biologists of Indonesia to save the coral reefs and the European Space Agency to detect wildfires and illegal deforestation.
In 2021 they worked out a sustainable business model to bring meaningful work for all and attracted an investment from LUMO Labs, an impact investor.
Meet the management team
Buster Franken
Buster holds a triple major in Mechanical Engineering, Neuroscience and Data Science from the Eindhoven University of Technology (TU/e) where he researched brain-computer interfacing.
He has worked as an actor, security guard, and chemistry teacher, where he found a burning passion for education. He helped found the TU/e AI institute where he remains active as AI program advisor.
His life’s mission is to change humanity’s mindset towards a truly sustainable development and restore balance in our ecosystem.
Sako Arts
Sako has a background in Computer Science @ TU/e where he was the first generation of the AI specialization Master he helped set up as a student advisor. He continued with setting up a Data Science department at a software company where he noticed he and his new employees were ill-prepared for real-world AI, so he decided to do something about it!
He is passionate about technology, science and education and directs all these passions towards deploying AI for Good on a global scale.
