LAST year’s winner of the BT Young Scientist and Technology Exhibition (BTYSE), Bandon’s Greg Tarr has fondly remembered the past year as one of the best of his short yet eventful life so far.
The former Bandon Grammar School student won the top prize in the prestigious competition for his project that used a sophisticated intelligence software programme that can efficiently detect ‘deepfake’ media with state-of-the-art accuracy. Having entered the competition five times, his perseverance and skills finally paid off for Greg.
Not only that, the entrepreneur – who celebrated his 19th birthday earlier this week – also took home third prize at the European Union Young Scientist Competition (EUCYS) as well as raising over $1.25m in capital for his start-up company, Inferex, which he set up two months after winning the BTYSE top prize.
The goal of his company is automate AI infrastructure for the world and he credits winning the competition as giving him credibility and thought despite his relatively young age.
Despite being inundated with job offers from AI (artificial intelligence) companies, he decided to go out on his own, bypassed college and set about raising the seed capital for his new venture.
‘The past year has been amazing and winning the BTYSE enabled me to raise over a million dollars and start an AI infrastructure company, which has been my dream for almost a decade now,’ Greg told The Southern Star.
‘We’re putting the money to good use and we’re expanding the team as rapidly as possible by hiring AI engineers and senior software engineers around the world on our new AI deployment platform.’
Greg’s team is sprinkled around the country as well as having employees based in Canada and the US.
They also have a data centre in Cork, where they host most of their infrastructure.
‘We’re making great advancement on the product and we are coming up with amazing ideas on how to help our customers and we’re talking to our customers every day.’
The ceo of Inferex added that all they need now is a group of incredible amazing people to build an amazing product and expects the coming year to be one of his busiest.
‘It’s pretty interesting to think that just a year ago I was working on a deepfake detector project and now I am managing a team of engineers building something that will help thousands of companies.’
