Q&A: Douglas Brion, information engineer and founder of an AI startup

What does your role involve?

I am the CEO and Founder of Matta, where we are building industrial AI for factory sentience. As a startup founder every day is different and my role is highly generalist, covering everything in the business – but excitingly, as the company grows, the priorities of my role change with it. Life is never dull!

I spend a lot of time with new and existing customers on the sales side, hiring and growing the team while keeping culture and the talent bar high, and fundraising with investors. On the technical side, I'm specifying the product roadmap with everything I've learned from customers; deep-diving into software and hardware engineering discussions – from how we install in factories to what architectural decisions are best for the software platform – whiteboarding new AI methods with the research team; and occasionally writing code at 3am if there's a massive crunch. Then there's all the business admin that keeps things running, which I normally try to cram into my Sundays.

What has been your biggest achievement or success in the last year?

Tough one – in a startup things move incredibly fast. The biggest thing has to be getting our AI, hardware and software out into factories in production. Just under a year ago we did our first ever factory installation (which was tricky…) and now we are installing with a new factory every two weeks. It is so satisfying having customers using your product every day.

A close second was an event we recently held at the Royal Academy of Engineering for 80 guests on the future of manufacturing. Some of the people who came had flown in from across the country, had never been to London before, or hadn't been in 25 or 30 years. It makes me quite emotional to think that some of the manufacturing community value what we do enough to do that. We also raised a $14 million seed round last autumn, which was pretty special – we were pre-empted, which doesn't happen often, so maybe we are doing something right!

Are new and emerging technologies having an impact on your role? If so, how?

Yes – AI, and I suspect this will be everyone's answer. Today's LLMs (large language models) have got so powerful (especially in the last couple of months) that they massively accelerate work. I use Claude, Gemini and ChatGPT on a daily basis: helping with proposals, automating tedious workflows, writing notes after meetings, and enabling me to vibe-code quickly and test ideas with the research team. I wouldn't have time to brainstorm new AI ideas in my role if I had to code everything from scratch.

What is your advice to budding engineers?

Don't think, just build. All of my best learnings have come from building machines, software, projects – whatever – not from reading a textbook or listening to a lecture. I spent my childhood tinkering with robots and weird inventions as play and now I get to do that every day for real. The dream! Just throw everything at it. Engineers created the entire modern world, and you too can play your part by getting on, building, and learning as you go.

For engineers a bit further along in their journey, my advice would be: always talk to your users or customers. Not only do you become a better engineer by getting real-world feedback rather than working in a vacuum, but it is also immensely rewarding to see people interacting with what you have brought into the world. I think in the UK we can always improve how we think about distribution, scaling, and customers, rather than just focusing on the deep technical work.

How does it feel to win this award?

It is such an incredible honour, and I am humbled that work I do for the sheer joy and love of it has been recognised in this way. The best thing is hopefully the award can help shine a light on how much amazing and interesting work there is still to be done in manufacturing, and I think the physical world is having an exciting renaissance.

I also feel like I am winning this on behalf of the whole team at Matta, who are doing incredible work across so many engineering disciplines and are really leading the way.