Hi, I'm Jascha Achterberg, and I build nature-inspired Intelligent Systems at Callosum & Cambridge.

My work focuses on how large-scale, heterogeneous computing systems, natural and artificial, achieve capabilities that no single uniform architecture can. I study the general principles by which distinct, specialised components, coordinated through the right connectivity and topology, produce intelligence greater than the sum of their parts; principles as evident in the brain's distributed architecture as in economic systems built on specialisation and exchange. Working from theoretical models through to hardware system prototypes, I develop novel algorithms and design computing systems that implement these principles directly, co-evolving chips and algorithms rather than treating either as fixed. This is what I am doing at Callosum (www.callosum.com), which I co-founded with Dan Akarca and where I serve as CTO: we build the infrastructure for heterogeneous chips and intelligence to co-evolve at scale (backed by Plural, Atomico, DCVC, the UK Sovereign AI Fund, ARIA, and many more). At Callosum we have just announced our $100M seed round: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2026-08-20/ai-startup-callosum-raises-100-million-to-make-ai-tasks-cheaper 

My path here started in Computational Neuroscience. I did my PhD at the University of Cambridge, at the MRC Cognition and Brain Sciences Unit and St John's College, supervised by John Duncan and Matthew Botvinick, in collaboration with Google DeepMind and Intel Labs, and funded by a Gates Cambridge Scholarship. My research focused on how the brain's large-scale architecture, including its specialised submodules, the circuit patterns within them, and the connectivity that lets different regions coordinate, gives rise to flexible, general intelligence, and how those same principles could translate into the design of large-scale computing systems. After my PhD I spent time as a Career Development Research Fellow at St John's College, Oxford, continuing that work at the intersection of neuroscience and computing, before returning to Cambridge, where I am an Associate Professor, bringing the ideas of heterogeneous computing to the next generation of researchers.