About us

One Team. One Mission.

Five people between Berlin and Darmstadt: engineering, machine learning, computational linguistics, psychology and business.

The team

Five people, one table.

Tim Altendorf

Tim Altendorf

Engineering & AI

Software Engineer · AI Startup Experience · Cognitive Science

Owns

On-device pipeline, encryption, enclave processing, deployment, technical hiring.

Sina Khudida

Sina Khudida

Research, ML & Ethics

Model Development · Cognitive Science · Ethical AI & Human Impact · User Research

Owns

Relevance and insight models, on-device inference, user research, ethical architecture, and the partnerships and networks around the project.

Jupp Krüger

Jupp Krüger

Linguistic & Model

NLP-engineering · Model Development · Sentiment Analysis

Owns

Delivery process, language analysis, documentation infrastructure.

Max Fleig

Max Fleig

Business & IT

Business-Focus · MVP-Definition · Agile Implementation

Owns

Strategy, funding, claims discipline, compliance and quality groundwork.

Katharina Schlenker

Katharina Schlenker

Psychology

Psychology · Psychotherapy in training

Owns

The distance between what a person says about their own week and what the product says back to them.

Each function has one owner. The first hire after our first raise is a growth role, because none of us has run consumer app growth at scale, and pretending otherwise would be the expensive kind of optimism.

Who we listen to

And two people who check what we claim.

None of them works here and none of them endorses the product. They advise informally, they read what we write, and one of them co-authored the research our method is built on.

Benjamin Aas

Informal advisor

Complexity science · Psychotherapy process research · LMU Munich

Researches how change happens in people, using complexity theory, across more than 25 international publications. He co-authored the research our method for finding turning points is built on, so we are proposing to extend work he helped publish.

Nora Daniels-Wredenhagen

Informal advisor

Dipl.-Psych. · MA (Oxon) · Universität Witten/Herdecke

Studied experimental, clinical and organisational psychology in Oxford, Berlin and Heidelberg. She researches self-organising systems, in people, in groups and in organisations, which is the same question this product asks about one person.

Benjamin and Nora co-founded the sysTelios Think Tank, a research circle that connects complexity science with how change actually happens. It has no stake in this company, and nothing on this site is endorsed by it.

Where this came from

A tool for understanding yourself should leave your life in your own hands.

This did not begin as a market opportunity. It began with our own lives: two of us kept noticing that the ordinary traces we leave behind said something about how we were doing that we could not see at the time. So we are building the version we would trust with our own data. It works from the trace you already leave, it stays on your device, and we cannot read it.

SINA KHUDIDA & TIM ALTENDORF · FOUNDERS

That constraint is not a feature we added later. It is the reason the product can touch material this personal at all.

Where we sit

Anchored at two universities.

Universities

TU Darmstadt and Humboldt University Berlin, with a faculty mentor anchoring the science base. Hesse anchors our funding application; Berlin gives us the deeper pool of consumer product talent.

Networks

2hearts, the German tech community for people with immigration backgrounds; regional startup networks; university entrepreneurship support. We are also recruiting a growth advisor with consumer app experience.

Recognition

Third place in the hessian.AI open idea competition, and an EXIST Women scholarship. Useful, and a long way from finished.

Talk to us

We answer our own email.

Whether you want to test an early build, advise us on growth, or ask an uncomfortable question about the architecture. All of it is welcome.

UnderstandUrself is a well-being and self-reflection tool. It is not a medical device and does not diagnose, treat, predict or provide early warning of any condition. If you are struggling, please speak to a qualified professional.