How I left Academia to become a Technopreneur: my journey from Archeology to Ludwig

Jour fixe talk by Antonio Rotolo on 23 October 2018

Antonio Roloto is an Alumnus affiliated with the Department of History and Sociology.

This is the story of how pursuing the dream of becoming an Archaeologist, Antonio Rotolo eventually ended up funding Ludwig (https://ludwig.guru/), a Computational Linguistics and Artificial Intelligence company. He started Ludwig as a side project in 2014 on the aftermath of his post-doc at MIT, where he matured the idea that he applies his archeological method to new problems, and matured while he was a fellow at the Zukunftskolleg (2014-2016). In 2014 his two co-founders and he were naively dreaming about building a software that would help billions of people (the three of them included) write better and with more confidence in English. In 2018, Ludwig has already helped 8 million unique users write better in English and achieve more in their career.

Ludwig, the name of their company, comes after Wittgenstein, the father of Philosophy of Language who inspired them with the quote “the limits of my language mean the limits of my world”. They created Ludwig to tear down those linguistic limits. They want to free the students and researchers of the world from their linguistic limits so that they can focus on the two things that really matter to them: learning and producing high-quality research.