Alex Honchar is co-founder and chief technology officer of Neurons Lab, an AI development, implementation and consulting firm based in London, England, that he started with Igor Sydorenko. He is a Ukrainian-born mathematician who taught himself machine learning as a student in Kyiv, Ukraine, and he leads the firm’s technical work for clients in investment management, financial services, insurance and healthcare.
From Web Design to Applied Mathematics in Kyiv
He began freelancing at 15, building websites in HTML and CSS. In 2011 he entered the applied mathematics program at the Kyiv Polytechnic Institute, where he discovered machine learning and took Andrew Ng’s online course, he told the Ukrainian technology site DOU in 2020. By his second and third years he was taking remote machine learning jobs for small companies in Ukraine, the United States and elsewhere, including a project that measured a person’s pulse through a phone camera and another that estimated the calories in a meal from a photograph.
Graduate Study in Verona, Italy
In 2015 he won a grant for a master’s degree in mathematics at the University of Verona. While studying he worked remotely for Mawi, a Ukrainian startup building a portable heart monitor, as its AI solutions architect, writing the algorithms that filtered the signal and detected disease. He stayed in Verona after graduating and later taught Python and machine learning tools in the university’s data science department. After seven years in Italy he moved to Madrid, Spain (Neurons Lab).
Starting Neurons Lab
By 2016 and 2017 his freelance projects had grown big enough that he brought in people he knew to do the technical work while he found clients and ran the team. He told DOU he had wanted his own business since his teens, and quoted Nassim Nicholas Taleb’s line that “the three most harmful addictions are heroin, carbohydrates, and a monthly salary.” In 2018 he and Sydorenko decided to start an AI consulting company, and they launched Neurons Lab in 2019. On the Startups of London podcast he said the biggest misconception about AI is expecting magic, and that it is better understood as a set of mathematical models.