Dryft is inspired by our love for speed and the physical world: cars, planes, machines and more. Most of our early team grew up in rural manufacturing towns. Collectively, we worked at more than ten manufacturing companies, designing robots, PCBs, machine lines or cars early in our lives.

Leonie, our CTO, grew up in Germany’s “packaging valley”. She’s spent her childhood working inside machine manufacturers and in high school built her first robotic automation line. She later designed race cars at Formula Student and became a core developer for the Porsche Taycan where she worked on predictive controllers. AJ, our CEO, started out as an internationally competitive ski racer. Her first job was at Viessmann, a German HVAC manufacturer. From there, she worked with Siemens’ AI Lab on the “factory of the future,” and later helped some of the world’s largest automotive suppliers reskill their workforces for new technologies.

Leonie and AJ met at Stanford while finishing their MS in Data Science and researching predictive systems. As they saw how every digital system was being rewritten with AI, it became clear how the same needs to happen in the industrial world. Our plan was set. Since then, we’ve spent thousands of hours with manufacturers across North America and Europe — listening to executives and shop-floor teams, and co-developing what became the first version of Dryft.

This is Day 0 for Dryft. The physical world has waited fifty years for its rewrite. We’re here to deliver it.