When Jim Dowling began studying artificial intelligence in Trinity College in the early 1990s, few enough people knew what it was. Fewer still could have predicted its far-reaching impact when what had been a slow burn for years suddenly caught fire.
“I finished my BA in AI in 1996 and at that time AI was pretty much irrelevant. Now it’s completely changing the nature of work and life. That’s a pretty impressive shift to have witnessed,” Dowling says.
From Lucan, Dowling is the lead founder of Hopsworks, a platform that enables organisations to build and operate their own AI systems. The company was formed in 2018 when Dowling, then an associate professor at the KTH Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm, left the university to start the business in the Swedish capital.
It was a brave move, but one Dowling had seen executed successfully by Chris Horn at Iona Technologies (now an Irish Times columnist), who had been head of DSG (distributed systems group) in Trinity College when Dowling was a computer science undergraduate there.
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“Chris and his team left en masse and when I decided we had a viable proposition, I followed their playbook,” says Dowling, who originally moved to Stockholm to join his girlfriend, now his wife, who is Swedish.
“Iona was developing much-needed core infrastructure, something that’s feasible in an academic environment because research is at the heart of what you do. In a commercial environment it would be practically impossible because the challenges and risks involved are too great and the probability of success too low,” Dowling says.
“Iona addressed the problem of connecting computers together. Hopsworks is addressing the problem of how to build software that can handle the huge amounts of data that go with AI. Our novel solution is based on scaling data for AI and we are now enabling our users to use AI to build AI.
“I’m not the only one from DSG in Trinity to have started a business,” Dowling says. “That group produced a lot of start-ups, largely because there was such a concentration of PhDs within it. There are not enough academic posts to go around and that created a very strong entrepreneurial spin-out environment where people were asking, what’s missing in terms of core infrastructure and how can we build it?
“When I went to KTH, I tried to reproduce the same environment. By then I’d also worked with MySQL” – one of the world’s most widely deployed open source database management systems – “in a senior technical role.
“Databases are the engines that power our data infrastructure and by recruiting people with deep expertise from MySQL and combining them with my team from KTH University, we have been able to compete globally with the world’s best in building software infrastructure support for AI,” Dowling says.
Dowling was able to develop and test the first version of the platform at KTH with funding from the European Union and the Swedish government. “This early funding is critical as it’s very hard to get money from investors when you’re building deep tech as it’s way too risky in their eyes,” he says. “However, you will attract venture capital when they see you have something with large-scale commercial value. What helped us secure funding was that we had a confirmed buyer for our system.”
Hopsworks’ first investor was Steve Collins from Irish VC Frontline Ventures, and its biggest backer to date is Finnish-based Inventure Capital. The company raised €1.25 million in its first round followed by €5 million in 2021 and a further €6 million in 2023. It will raise funds again, but not until next year.
“We currently generate more of our income in the US than in Europe, mainly because US companies are more willing to take a punt on a new technology. We employ 36 people and have grown by 280 per cent in the last 12 months,” Dowling says. “We are in the top 100 start-ups for the Nordics and Benelux on Sifted 100″ – the FT-backed analysis and commentary on the European start-up community – “and are the leading AI software infrastructure company on that list.
“Our annually recurring revenue is $2.7 million” (€2.3 million) “and we expect to triple this by the end of 2026.”
Building deep tech requires high-calibre people; there are 11 PhDs on the Hopsworks staff while the company’s engineers are all educated to master’s level or above.
“This is where the university system is incredibly important but also the interaction between the university system and industry,” Dowling says.
“When I went to KTH, I saw they had a PhD in refrigeration technology and I couldn’t believe it. It was so specific. But it exists to help Swedish companies working with refrigeration to be world-leading.
“In Germany there’s a technical university system and we’ve kind of tried to do this in Ireland but not as successfully yet. The highest-calibre students still tend to gravitate towards the traditional universities which, by and large, have not embraced their potential role as the engines of modern technology.”
The Hopsworks platform is horizontal, meaning it’s not just for one industry. This is reflected in the spread of the company’s customers, which include Paddy Power, Ericsson, fashion and accessories ecommerce company Zalando and Sweden’s prestigious medical research university the Karolinska Institute. Former car manufacturer Saab, which is now a defence company making fighter jets, is also a customer.
Dowling says that while Hopsworks is on a roll, there is no time to sit back and savour the taste of success. “We operate in an area that’s essentially a moving target and, like anyone starting a company in a fast-moving space, you have two choices. You either pick a niche, do it well and hope to get acquired by a bigger player or you go for broke with the big idea and do it better than anyone else.
“Option one is a reasonable strategy, but I’m not a reasonable guy,” Dowling adds. “George Bernard Shaw said that ‘the reasonable man adapts himself to the world around him; the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore, all progress depends on the unreasonable man.’ I suppose we’re a bit like Tesla. We too started from scratch with an ambitious goal to become the highest performer in the data for AI space.”
As a practical example of where Hopsworks fits into the AI firmament, Dowling refers to the company’s involvement with the Karolinska Institute, where the amount of data storage required is calculated in petabytes, with one petabyte being roughly equivalent to one million gigabytes or the storage contained in about 1,000 laptops.
“A team of researchers at Karolinska is working on cervical cancer and all Swedish women are screened at a certain age and the samples taken are run through a sequencing machine to extract the DNA and turn it into digital representation,” Dowling says. “This generates a massive amount of data because each human piece of DNA has three billion pieces of information.
“Processing this data in a way that makes it accessible and usable is a huge challenge and that’s where organisations can leverage the value of our platform. We can bridge the technical gap between all the data coming in and giving researchers the fast and accurate insights they need.”
Chief executives often get stick for the size of their pay packets but Dowling says he earns roughly the same salary as a computer programmer in Ireland and not as much as some of the higher-paid ones.
“Having a modest income is not an issue in Sweden.” As he lives in a rent-controlled apartment in Stockholm, childcare costs are very low – and the public transport system is excellent. Like many of those living in the Swedish archipelago, Dowling has a boat and one of the lifestyle advantages of where he lives is that he can walk from his apartment to his mooring.
“Swedish people take pride in Swedish companies and they tend to prefer to buy Swedish and expect their products and services to be of the highest quality. Irish people don’t tend to have the same attitude to buying Irish when it comes to software or products,” Dowling says.
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“If you speak Swedish as a native English speaker, you earn their instant respect as they know you don’t need to learn Swedish to live in Stockholm. The Teutonic punctuality can be a surprise to Irish people. You will get a cross eye if you suggest the meeting should have started without you because you were late.
“Being a boss in Sweden is not universally considered an achievement given the compressed wage structure and the very bottom-up, consensus-driven business culture. The boss cannot just ‘point with the whole hand’ [tell you what to do]. As a boss, you need to explain, discuss and reach agreement on strategy, tasks, delivery and expectations. The good side of this is that people work more independently and take responsibility seriously, with less need for management. The rats don’t dance on the table when the cat is away.”
Dowling is a dyed-in-the-wool techie who has watched the AI explosion with mixed feelings. As a former academic and researcher, he appreciates the scale of what has been achieved at an intellectual level. However, as someone who understands the ramifications of AI better than most, he has deep concerns about Europe’s lack of digital sovereignty.
In particular, he is very unhappy about Europe’s dependence on the systems developed by US tech giants Microsoft, Amazon, Apple and Google. These systems determine not only how commerce runs in Europe but they also control vast swathes of national infrastructures and public utilities across the bloc.
If Microsoft wanted, it could close down a small country in a few hours just by withdrawing its service, Dowling says, adding that where once these infrastructure providers were seen as benign, changes in the US administration mean this is no longer the case.
“If you don’t have digital sovereignty, you don’t have sovereignty as a country and right now, we don’t control the digital infrastructure that underpins our society,” he says. “Europe has not been building for the technical era we now live in. As a result, it’s running a huge technical infrastructure deficit.
“We essentially invited the Americans in to build the cloud. Nokia, which could have been one of Europe’s big hitters with its one-time ‘ownership’ of the mobile space, ended up as one of its greatest catastrophes, and the infrastructure gain was lost to US companies. The compounding problem is that when you lose a platform, you lose all the ancillary parts around it. Europe lost the core mobile phone segment and has ended up just building apps. Sure, we’ve built successful ones like Spotify. But they’re not on a US scale.”
Hopsworks is among a small coterie of European companies trying to address the digital infrastructure deficit. In July this year, the European Commission threw its weight behind the issue with the publication of a roadmap aimed at “positioning open-source software as a central pillar of Europe’s strategy to strengthen its technological autonomy” from non-EU players.
[ Is sovereign AI the answer for Ireland?Opens in new window ]
“Europe has begun to build some private clouds, such as OVH in France and the Schwartz cloud in Germany, which is a start,” Dowling says. “The second part of the infrastructure needed for AI are large language models where Google and Facebook dominate. But France is developing Mistral to compete, and president Macron has really put his weight behind it.
“China doesn’t run on US infrastructure. It built its own by regulating out the American cloud giants, giving its local companies – Alibaba, Tencent, WeChat – space to develop and compete globally. China protected its clouds, built its digital infrastructure internally through regulation and is now ready to compete globally, whereas Europe didn’t protect anything. It built on American platforms and now we’re paying the price.”
Dowling says the penny has begun to drop in Europe about the critical importance of strategic autonomy but not equally across the region.
“Every French person knows what strategic autonomy is. So does every German person because their leaders talk about it quite frequently,” he says. “In Ireland and other countries, it’s head in the sand to avoid upsetting the transatlantic alliance.
“Airbus is the canonical example of what Europe needs now for digital sovereignty,” Dowling adds. “When Boeing threatened to dominate air travel, then the technology of the future, in the 1970s, Europe came together and started Airbus. One country was not big enough but, together, Europe built a competitor that has succeeded dramatically. Governments led this initiative back then, but now governments cower at interfering in the market economy.”
Dowling has just written a book on AI systems. So, is it all his own work or did he get a little help from ChatGPT? “ChatGPT was useful for proofreading but not for thinking. The thinking and the construction are mine. Text should still be the product of original thought,” he says.
“AI is useful for references and fact checking but large databases in the AI community are stochastic parrots – as in they’re just repeating what they’ve heard, as it were. There’s still an ongoing debate as to whether they can actually generate new knowledge or just repeat what they’ve learned.
“Obviously they’re very useful and will vastly change how we work. We’re already seeing how they’re changing computer programming by enabling companies like Hopsworks to help non-programmers build AI systems.
“That’s a huge advance and a seismic shift for the software industry where products have traditionally been slow to develop and expensive to buy. AI cuts time and cost involved dramatically. Software is one of the first industries that will be revolutionised by AI. It will be a period of dislocation for many industries and a big challenge to redistribute the benefits of AI.”
CV
Name: Jim Dowling
Job: CEO and co-founder, Hopsworks
Age: 51
Lives: Central Stockholm
Family: Married with three children, two sons aged 16 and 14 and a daughter aged seven
Hobbies: In summer it’s cycling and going out in our motorboat. In winter it’s guitar and snowboarding.
Something we might expect: Once an academic, always an academic. Dowling has recently written a book on AI systems
Something that might surprise: He speaks four languages alongside English – Swedish, German, French, and Spanish
