Gayatri Kalyanaraman is in conversation with Dr. Fred Jordan, CEO and Co-Founder at AlpVision and FinalSpark - Expert anticounterfeit technologies - Expert biocomputing talks about his journey to make a difference in AI and what propelled him to do that.
1. Early Career — Curiosity, Coincidence, and Counterfeits
- Fred describes himself modestly as a French physicist who stumbled into entrepreneurship by "provoking luck."
- He and his co-founder Martin Kutter began with research in digital watermarking, creating invisible marks on media.
- Their startup AlfVision emerged from this — aimed at detecting counterfeit goods using image analysis.
- Lessons from early failures (9 out of 10 products failed) were key to refining their success.
2. Making the Mark — Patents, Passion, and Intellectual Property
- Fred emphasizes building a business around passion, but insists on profitability too.
- He stresses the importance of understanding finance, even for technical founders.
- As a multi-founder and active programmer, he still codes when needed — including writing software that led to a patent and successful tech deployment in China.
3. Creating a Legacy — Bio-Neurons and a Sustainable Future
- Final Spark emerged from Fred and Martin’s desire to return to fundamental research, after years of commercial success.
- Their mission: dramatically reduce the energy and resources required to run AI by leveraging real neurons instead of digital simulations — achieving up to 1 million times greater energy efficiency.
- In their lab in Switzerland, they’ve created a testbed where biological neural tissues are grown, connected via electrodes, and streamed in real-time — with microfluidics feeding them 24/7.
- Fred draws a direct parallel between learning in artificial neural networks (via adjusting weights) and the biological challenge of inducing learning by reconfiguring synaptic connections. This forms the crux of building a true biological computing server.
- “When you have artificial neurons, learning is done by setting the right connections between them. We need to do the same in biology. That’s how humans learn — and that’s what we have to replicate in vitro.”
- The long-term vision is bold:
- Create biological servers at scale (10cm x 100m tissues) that could power AI with drastically less energy.
- Biological intelligence becoming mainstream — just as LED lights replaced incandescent bulbs.
- A future with hybrid bio-artificial objects — think of a glass that detects your mood and adjusts your drink accordingly.
- Breakaway quote-worthy moments
- “Trial and error is really precious... Being a co-founder, failures teach you very, very valuable lessons.”
- “I’m not building something for today — I want it to make sense even from 100 million kilometers away.”
- His thoughts on entrepreneurship:
- “You need to be not bad at many things. Everything is holistic.”
- “If you don't work for your dreams, you work for someone else's.”
Fred Jordan is an Experienced Chief Executive Officer with a demonstrated history of successful and profitable businesses. Skilled in Innovation, Computer Science, Artificial Intelligence, Programming, Marketing, Management and Entrepreneurship. Scientific education with M.Sc. in physics and Ph.D. in signal processing.
Co-founder of:
- AlpVision: Supplier of technologies and smartphone solutions for automatic detection of genuine and fake products.
- FinalSpark: Startup using biological neural networks for the design of Artificial General Intelligence.
Dr. Fred Jordan started their journey in technology entrepreneurship after completing his PhDs at EPFL in applied mathematics. This work gave them the inspiration for their first successful start-up, AlpVision, where they excelled at overcoming engineering challenges and created an innovative solution for product authentication. The company became very profitable and is still successfully run by them.
This brought the co-founders Fred and Martin to a new, even bigger challenge, to address the problem of Artificial General Intelligence. Creating a ‘Thinking Machine’ is a dream of many engineers. A machine which can reason as a human being is considered by many as a peak performance to be achieved in engineering.
Although we currently observe the flourishing of the AI models which make impression of being able
to think, as they successfully ‘fake’ human thinking with advanced statistics, this has nothing to do with
human reasoning which is capable of creating new ideas and concepts outside its own experience. This
is what a ‘real’ thinking machine should do as well.
Fred and Martin decided to address this problem by testing the state-of-the-art methods in AI models, such as in silico spiking neural networks, genetic programming and many versions of in silico neural networks.
Multidisciplinary thinking and the interest to explore unknown areas lead Fred and Martin to work on living neurons as computation units. They established FinalSpark lab which is currently running fundamental research with one main question: How to make living neurons perform intended computations?
How to send instructions to the living neurons using electric wires and receive results – the same way
as we send the instructions by typing on our keyboard and receive the answers from in silico computers
on our screens.
Fred Jordan can be reached at https://www.linkedin.com/in/fred-jordan-anticounterfeiting-brandprotection-authentication/
