Kern AI

Kern AI, founded in November 2020 by Johannes Hötter and Henrik Wenck, provides a data-centric development platform for natural language processing (NLP). The founders met during their master's studies at the Hasso Plattner Institute, where they researched modern NLP and started an AI consultancy in early 2020. This experience revealed that a primary challenge in AI development is not the algorithms themselves, but the quality of the data used to train them, which led them to pivot from consultancy to building a software platform.

The company's core business revolves around a low-code platform that empowers developers and data scientists to build, deploy, and maintain reliable Large Language Model (LLM) applications. Kern AI focuses on improving the data foundation for AI systems, addressing the issue that developers often spend the majority of their time on data review rather than model development. The platform achieves this by enabling users to model, clean, and prepare their unstructured text data, ensuring it is AI-ready and can be understood by LLMs like ChatGPT to produce trustworthy and accurate results. Its business model includes a commercial end-to-end framework, particularly for clients in the financial and insurance sectors, and also offers a free tier for individual developers.

Kern AI's platform is a suite of modular tools. An open-source component, "refinery", allows developers to scale, assess, and maintain natural language data. This is complemented by "bricks," a collection of standardized code snippets, and "gates," an API for monitoring and inference. The platform facilitates a variety of applications, including the development of internal AI chatbots for customer service, claims management, and sentiment analysis. It serves a range of clients from large enterprises and insurance companies like Barmenia, HDI Global Specialty, and Samsung, to venture-backed startups. A key achievement is the ability to build Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) chatbots with a hallucination rate under 1%, a critical feature for their focus on the financial services industry. In May 2025, Kern AI was acquired by the Accompio Group to integrate its AI expertise into Accompio's portfolio of IT services.

Keywords: data-centric AI, natural language processing, NLP platform, large language models, LLM, data labeling, training data, AI development, machine learning, Retrieval-Augmented Generation, RAG, AI chatbot, financial services AI, insurance technology, data quality, weak supervision, active learning, Johannes Hötter, Henrik Wenck, Accompio Group