Sofie Van der Meulen is the co-founder (alongside Bram Coenraets) of Neuromorphic Foundries, the Leuven-based company building offline, single-instance neural core hardware as a direct alternative to the cognition-cluster rental model. A former imec researcher, she founded the company in 2058 initially pursuing efficiency research in the tradition of the Volkonsky et al. (2055) sparse scaffold paper.
Her stated motivation is a structural critique of the commercial neural core industry: “Efficiency research that threatens the rental model was never going to come from inside the companies built on the rental model.” The company’s direction was catalyzed by Kosmograd — the demonstration that a genuinely efficient cognitive system could run an entire settlement’s infrastructure on dramatically smaller hardware than commercial cluster operators had shipped.
In a 2063 interview with The Ledger, Van der Meulen was notably candid about her priorities: asked whether the company would crack down on community members publishing derivative instances trained on independently fabricated hardware, she characterized watching the technology “escape the small number of companies that built the rental economy around it” as “the single most satisfying part of this entire five-year project.” The company’s architecture and baseline instance were released under open license in 2062.
On the trajectory of miniaturization, she declined to predict timelines but acknowledged she had “stopped betting against this getting smaller” — a position she had reversed twice in five years, most recently in response to Kosmograd.