creators

Max Welling: VAE co-inventor, CuspAI CTO

Max Welling is a machine learning professor at the University of Amsterdam and co-founder and CTO of CuspAI. He co-invented the variational autoencoder in 2013.

Max Welling is a Dutch computer scientist and professor of machine learning at the University of Amsterdam, where he heads the Amsterdam Machine Learning Lab (AMLab) and co-founded the national Innovation Centre for Artificial Intelligence (ICAI). He took his PhD in theoretical physics at Utrecht in 1998 under Gerard 't Hooft, was a vice-president at Qualcomm, and was a Distinguished Scientist at Microsoft Research AI4Science until April 2024. He is a fellow of CIFAR and of ELLIS, the European machine learning network he helped establish. He is best known for co-inventing the variational autoencoder with his student Diederik "Durk" Kingma in their 2013 paper "Auto-Encoding Variational Bayes", which took the ICLR Test of Time Award in 2024. He also co-authored the graph convolutional network paper with Thomas Kipf and work on group-equivariant convolutional networks. He was elected to the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences in May 2025 and won the Dutch AI Award in March 2026. In 2024 he co-founded CuspAI, which applies AI to discovering new materials and is headquartered in Cambridge, UK; he is its chief technology officer. The company raised a $450 million Series B in July 2026, led by Kleiner Perkins and NEA.

Specialization

generative models, equivariant neural networks, graph neural networks, AI for materials discovery

Country

Netherlands