Founders

LEAP 71 is two people: Josefine Lissner and Lin Kayser.

The couple co-founded the company in 2023 after meeting at Kayser’s previous company.

Lissner, an aerospace engineer, focuses on building and extending Noyron, LEAP 71’s Large Computational Engineering Model to new fields.

Kayser, a serial entrepreneur who has been building software since early childhood, is the author of the base technology, which includes PicoGK, the open-source geometry kernel that supports all of LEAP 71’s work.

Lissner and Kayser have no immediate plans to extend the team.

Growth comes from the compounding effect of employing algorithms to do the work, and scaling compute over time.

Josefine Lissner, CEO of LEAP 71 and principal architect of Noyron, is a pioneer in the emerging field of Computational Engineering. Some of her work has been hailed as a historic milestone in the way we build in the 21st century. Lissner is driven by the ambition to prove that engineers, when they meticulously transcribe their methods and knowledge into computer code, are orders of magnitude faster, capable of building the world’s most sophisticated machines.

Before co-founding LEAP 71, she was the Strategic Engineering Lead at Hyperganic, Lin Kayser’s previous company. She holds a Master’s degree in Aerospace, Aeronautical and Astronautical/Space Engineering from the University of Stuttgart, Germany.

From 2017 to 2018, as part of the Mercedes-AMG Petronas Formula One team, she contributed to the aerodynamic design of Lewis Hamilton’s championship-winning car, before joining Porsche Motorsports and their newly founded Formula E team.

Josefine Lissner is an accomplished endurance athlete, winning the 110 km Hadrian’s Wall Ultramarathon in 2018.

Lin Kayser has been building high-technology companies for more than 30 years. For the last decade he has been driven by a haunting question: Why is engineering in the physical world so much slower than software — and why haven’t we built the machines that science fiction once promised?

In 2014 he started Hyperganic, which built advanced design technology for 3D printing. His career began in the 1990s at ARADEX, an early pioneer in high-speed control systems for industrial machines. In 2000 he founded IRIDAS, which developed foundational technologies for digital cinema, pioneering the use of the GPU for image processing. IRIDAS tools were widely adopted in Hollywood, including on The Matrix movies. The company was acquired by Adobe in 2011.

A self-taught software engineer, Kayser began coding as a child in 1980. At LEAP 71 he focuses on PicoGK and the broader Noyron/AI framework, while supporting the open-source movement around Computational Engineering. He is writing an open-access book, Coding for Engineers, and has authored many articles on the transformative potential of bringing engineering under Moore’s Law.