Your digital community’s knight in shining armour

Usually found patrolling chatrooms making sure the kids are ok

We are an independent next generation cyber security company protecting our clients’ content and their customers. We enable safe digital lives for kids and teenagers by preventing bullying, harassment, and cyber grooming in online communities. Our ai-powered SaaS solution detect unwanted behavior in real-time, flag fake profiles and predict dangerous conversations to stop abuse before it happens.

Amanda represents a new era in chatroom moderation by greatly improving the quality and efficiency of the moderators’ job. In turn this will increase the online communities’ health and reputation, attract customers, and make them more likely to stay.

Story

Inventor

Patrick Bours
Professor at Department of Information Security
and Communication Technology, NTNU

Founded on a calling to make the internet a safer place

Patrick is a professor at The Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU), specialized in behavioural biometrics. Aiba is a result of 7 years of research led by Professor Patrick Bours.

Back in 2016 a sextorition story with a tragic outcome sparked Patrick’s interest: Fourteen-year-old Amanda Todd met an adult male online, pretending to be an eighteen-year-old boy. She was later extorted and harassed with the threat of exposing intimate photographs she had shared.

Knowing that keystroke dynamics could tell something about the age and gender of a person, the idea of Amanda was born.

Since then, the focus moved to detection of predatory conversations based on text. This was already a topic high on the research agenda in 2012, but all research was done from a forensic point of view; analyzing full conversations after the fact. Useful for investigations but not preventive.

Based on the idea of a proactive system, Patrick’s research has mainly been on early detection of cyber grooming conversations with two main goals in mind: As early detection as possible while maintaining privacy. Major progress has been made on both goals with Amanda: only the last message in a conversation is analyzed at any time and on average only 20 lines of text are needed to detect a predatory conversation.

Team

Team

Hege Tokerud

Chief Executive Officer

Hege Tokerud holds a master degree in computer science and technology management from the Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU), and has since her early days been part of the startup ecosystem in Norway.

She has over 15 years of experience been building business opportunities out of new technology, both as management consultant, investor and a driving force in the commercialization of cyber security research at NTNU for the last four years. She has been key in founding other companies, and Aiba is her fifth research-based company out of NTNU. In addition, she has over ten years of experience of directorship.

She knows what it takes to create a successful company and sheis driven by making a positive impact on the world. She believes key to success is about hiring the right people, and cultivate a great company culture top talents want to be a part of.

She is selected as member in FORBES business council and was awarded one of fifty women in tech in Norway in 2023.

Gard Støe

Chief Technology Officer

Gard has a master in Science, Technology and Society at NTNU and an Exec. Master of Technology Management at NTNU.

20+ years experience with IT and business development. Building and leading diverse multidisciplinary development teams with proven results.

Competency ranging from automating processes, system integration, architecture, security and developing applications. The last 5 years focusing on innovation, experiments and data science.

Strong believer in autonomous, diverse teams and the freedom to experiment while keeping user needs at the front of the development.

Anne Lise Waal

Chief Operations Officer

Anne Lise Waal holds an MSc in Computer Science from NTNU. She has more than 15 years experience as executive and entrepreneur in SaaS and gaming companies. Anne Lise also has extensive board experience, having served on the board on multiple companies from stock listed to start-ups, she brings extensive knowledge of tech strategy, SaaS business growth as well as perspectives on how to build winning teams. As an active participant in the startup community, she also acts as angel investor and mentor to selected startups. Before joining Aiba, Anne Lise worked 7 years as senior producer at leading Norwegian game developer Funcom, as well as CTO & COO at Attensi for 9 years, where she joined the company at startup and was part of the founding team growing the company to a world leader in the field of gamified learning in the corporate learning and development space.

Patrick Bours

Lead Reseacher

Coming soon

Steinar Kvam

Chief Design Officer

Steinar holds a BA in Electronic Media Design from University of Sunderland. He has 15 + years experience as a multidisciplinary designer and communicator with work history from both agencies and as an entrepreneur running his own agency. Many years of experience enables him to cover a wide range within the design discipline such as UX-design, visual communication, web development, corporate identity, and copywriting. Recent years he has been working a lot with deep tech start-ups coming out of the Norwegian University of Science and Technology.

Marcus Hülsdau

Data Scientist

Marcus Hülsdau studied electrical engineering in Münster, Germany and holds two M.Sc from Kozminski University (Poland) and Lancaster University (UK). Before joining Aiba, Marcus helped some of the largest companies in Germany implementing natural language processing in their customer facing operations and founded a med-tech startup. 

Sushma Venkatesh

AI/ML Expert

Sushma Venkatesh holds a PhD from Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU). She holds 10+ years of experience from research based on pattern recognition and applied machine learning. She has extensively worked on various attacks generated on images. One of the critical attack that the border control is going through is the morphing attack generated on the passport facial images. Sushma has provided various solutions to detect the facial morphing images based on the machine learning approaches. She has authored/co-authored more than 50 scientific publications and holds a patent on morphing attack detection. As of 2023, Sushma holds h-index of 19 and 1156 citations.

Lars Lydersen

Board Chairman

Lars Lydersen holds a bachelor’s degree in econoomics from The University of Oslo, a master’s degree in electronics and a PhD in Quantum Cryptography from The Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU). He has broad international experience from technology startups. Currently, he works as an investment partner in Wiski Capital, an early-phase venture capital firm backing the rawest technology founders to shape the future.

Ralph Natter Berg

Board Member

Coming soon