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Galvin Widjaja, founder and CEO of Lauretta AI, shares his journey from restaurant management to leading a privacy-first computer vision company that predicts human behavior without using biometrics. His unconventional path provides unique insights into building AI that respects privacy while effectively understanding human intent.
Here are the seven biggest takeouts from the interview:
1. AI Should Predict Human Intent — Without Biometrics
“Lauretta’s fundamental technology is the ability to do non-biometric tracking across CCTV cameras… I can do that right now with a 95% to 98% accuracy across like a quarter of a million people walking through a shopping mall at the same time.”
2. Security vs Retail: Same Tech, Different Purpose
“Security is the industry of inconsistent purpose. And retail is a business of understanding the level of desire behind your purpose.”
3. From Fried Noodles to Frontier Tech
Galvin’s entrepreneurial roots run deep — from his father’s fried noodle shop in Jakarta where he managed three migrant-serving restaurants in Singapore. That hands-on experience with human behavior in physical spaces now powers his AI vision.
4. The YouTube Problem in AI Training
“The problem that we have right now is that almost all AI is trained on YouTube videos… it has a director and a cameraman. And a director and a cameraman means there is an implicit intent of what the purpose of the video is.”
5. Privacy by Design, Not by Patch
“We captured no biometric from the beginning… it’s built in such a way that at every stage of the system, there is transparency on the information that we capture, the way that we use it, the way we encode it, the way that we transfer it, and the way that we connect it with other information.”
6. Winning Homeland Security Without a US Office
Despite being headquartered in Singapore at the time, Lauretta AI won its first Homeland Security contract in 2019 — a signal that vision and trust can matter more than geography.
7. AI’s Evolution: From Detection to Understanding
Galvin sees AI as progressing in stages: inference → classification → aggregation → higher-order thinking. Lauretta’s bet is on this next frontier: AI that doesn’t just classify behavior, but understands context.
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Links:
https://lauretta.io/
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