About Namche
Namche works with businesses on concrete undertakings and uses what AI makes possible to develop products and projects of its own. It is always about turning a technical possibility into something that actually helps people in their work.
Purpose
Namche exists to help turn advances in AI into greater human agency, stronger businesses, European self-determination and lower resource use.
These outcomes belong together: commercial success sustains the work, capability and control make it durable, and care for resources shapes how it is done. Where we claim that time, material, energy or compute is saved, we measure it.
Who is behind Namche
I’m Jodok Batlogg, an entrepreneur and engineer based in Dornbirn, Austria. For more than 25 years I have worked across technology, product and business. I have founded companies, developed software, led teams and built technology businesses internationally.
With Namche, I bring that experience to AI. I work with businesses on concrete undertakings and develop products and projects of my own. What interests me is how a technical possibility becomes something that helps people in their work.
Selected experience
A climate platform with digital twins of forests that makes nature-based carbon removal transparent. Sales to corporate customers, TÜV-certified processes and a team across forestry science, technology and carbon markets, in Dornbirn, Munich and Winterthur.
Customers included
A distributed SQL database for the industrial IoT and large volumes of data. Building the company took us from Dornbirn to Berlin and San Francisco, with 65 people across Europe and the US and funding from Silicon Valley. The work spanned technology, product, funding and international sales. Crate won the Startup Battlefield at TechCrunch Disrupt Europe in London in 2014 and was named a Gartner Cool Vendor.
Customers included
Responsibility for technology, product and operations at the largest German-language website of its time: 300 employees, 60 developers and 18 billion page views a month. We re-architected the platform and scaled the backend infrastructure. At that scale, reliability, architecture and clear decisions become daily concerns.
Building a 25-person engineering company for leading media organisations and industrial businesses in Europe and the US, among the first in Europe to run production systems on AWS. Distributed systems, search infrastructure and platforms for user-generated content still inform how I think about systems.
Past roles. The companies named here and their customers are not Namche clients.
On closing the Tree.ly and Pina Earth chapter and the next entrepreneurial direction: responsible AI and digital sovereignty.
A conversation about AI as a tool, human judgment and what matters when using this technology.
A personal experiment with an AI agent. The note describes the project as it stood at the time and the thinking behind its construction.
Improvement can compound, and so can deterioration. Neither happens by itself; it depends on how organisations use the technology.
As knowledge, software and experiments get cheaper, progress is limited more and more by purpose, context, judgment, trustworthy data, responsibility and the ability to learn together.
Poor data, unclear authority, weak evaluation, low trust or no time to learn can break any improvement. Faster output can also mean more waste.
Principles
I can help develop an architecture and assess with you whether the investment makes sense for your company.
We decline work whose purpose or foreseeable use depends on exploitation, deception, addiction or undermining people’s agency.
Products and projects
Namche is also where I develop projects of my own. Practical work with new technology is part of being an entrepreneur: I want to understand what can be built with it and turn promising ideas into independent projects. What we learn there flows into client work, and the other way round.
Why Namche?
Namche is named after Namche Bazaar, a starting point for journeys into the Himalayas and home of the Sherpa people. Sherpas are known as reliable, modest companions who help others find their way through unexplored terrain. That is the role we want to take: beginning an undertaking with curiosity and preparation, and staying at your side on unfamiliar ground.
If you are working on a concrete AI undertaking, are interested in our own development or would like to work with us, I’d be glad to hear from you.