Tomas Mikolov
Chief SCIENTIFIC Officer
Tomas is a world-renowned AI researcher. The creator of word2vec, which proposed how machines could understand human language, laying the foundation for modern AI applications from neural language models in 2007 and his RNNLM toolkit was the first to demonstrate the capability to train language models on large corpora, resulting in large improvements over the state of the art. He has been researching under Facebook, Google and Microsoft.
Jaroslav Beck
Chief EXECUTIVE Officer
Jaroslav is an entrepreneur, Co-founder of Beat Games, studio behind the biggest VR game to date - Beat Saber (10M+ copies sold), Jaroslav initiated acquisition by Meta in 2019 and continued steering the studio post-exit. After leaving Meta in 2023, he invested in projects driving global positive impact in tech and multiple other fields.
David Herel
Senior Scientist & Head of Development
David is an AI researcher specializing in advanced language modeling and generative AI. He co-founded an algorithmic trading venture alongside Tomas Mikolov. His work has appeared in top-tier conferences (ICLR, ECAI).
At BottleCap AI, our goal is to develop a new generation of large language models — the backbone of what we call “AI” today — with efficiency as a core operational principle.
If you think Transformers and a lot of GPUs is all you need, then you may be surprised!
We focus on architecture-first, efficiency-focused foundational LLMs, designed to reason better per unit of compute and unlock applications that were previously impractical.
Our team combines deep research and real product development under one roof. If something works in the lab, we ship it into an application right away.
BottleCapAI was initially bottstrapped by Jaroslav Beck and Tomas Mikolov.
Once it became clear that the team could move fast and ship real products, we brought in strategic partners to accelerate development — with 20VC leading our seed round alongside world-class founders from companies including Lovable, ElevenLabs, Datadog, Hugging Face, Canva, Supercell, and others.
The name BottleCap is a tongue-in-cheek reference to a meme comparing European innovation to tethered bottle caps, in contrast to SpaceX rockets. While exaggerated, it reflects a real challenge: innovation in Europe can move slower than it should due to heavy regulation.
AI is the defining technology of the 21st century. For Europe to remain competitive, it will take bold ideas, relentless execution, and world-class talent.
And we are building just that — join us
One month ago, we started BottleCap AI with the mission to build a European research hub to make LLMs (today’s AI models) radically more efficient with the ambitious goal to increase efficiency of most prominent models by 100x.
While we’re still forming the core dev team led by Tomas Mikolov we’ve already built a new algorithm that cuts LLM’s training costs up to 50%.
To put that in perspective: training a cutting-edge large language model can cost tens of millions of dollars. With our new approach, that number can drop by nearly half as of today. Promising start!
We’re not just rehashing trendy ideas like Mixture of Experts. Our new algorithms focus on speed, and in some cases have potential to even improve generalization, which can bring completely new capability to current AI models.
Lot of work ahead, but we are very optimistic about the future of LLMs!
We are looking for the most motivated scientists and product builders who are passionate about LLMs and turning research into real, useful applications.
We want people ready to do the best work of their lives — helping Europe deliver world-class innovation in AI efficiency on a global stage.
If you’re a researcher, engineer, or builder passionate about creating the future of AI, join us. We’re hiring!
