Meet co-founder and innovator Ton
It was time for Artificial Intelligence to finally get really up to speed...

Artificial Intelligence is finally picking up steam…
One of the co-founders of Grexx is Ton Romeyn, who, alongside Pieter Hufen, Erica Rietveld, Hans de Hoog and Niels Klinkenberg, founded the company in 2000. All five of them still play a role in Grexx to varying degrees. This is certainly true for Ton who served as Grexx’s CTO, before passing the torch to current CTO Bart Laarhoven in early 2023. As of January 2023, Ton has taken on a new role as the company’s Chief Innovation Officer.
Broad background with focus on Artificial Intelligence
Ton started with a bachelor's degree in mathematics back in the mid-1970’s, but graduated as a cognitive psychologist. Although somewhat unconventional for an ex-CTO, Ton used his educational background to drive and develop his passion, artificial intelligence.
Ton: "In my math studies at TU Delft, you could choose the computer science variant in the second year. That seemed like a good idea, but I didn't find the automation processes very interesting at all. At one point I took some lectures from Joop Doorman. He was then a professor of philosophy at TU Delft, a philosopher of science and logician, a very inspiring man. When he spoke about artificial intelligence, I knew that I wanted to be involved. I found AI and its way of thinking much more interesting than what I previously encountered in my education.
After some wandering, I encountered a group of psychologists in Amsterdam who were also working on AI. This was in the late seventies, early eighties, and the potential of AI was not so obvious back then. Long story short, I first studied psychology in Leiden, to lay a foundation, and then I did a master's degree in psychology in which I majored in AI and Machine Learning, at the University of Amsterdam. I had wanted to finish Mathematics/Informatics, but it never came to fruition. Thus, I became a cognitive psychologist."
Early emergence of AI
"After completing my education, I started working with AI, creating teaching assistants. In practice, these were mostly expert systems: rule-based systems, formalized knowledge, exactly what I didn't want. I had gone from math to psychology because I wanted to learn the way people learn through inductive reasoning from data. So, I set up my own company pretty quickly to focus on that and my colleague and I worked on machine learning projects, but found that the time wasn't ripe for it just yet. Too little data, too little computing power. We were a little too far ahead of the industry at the time.
After about six years, I quit that and went to work at BSO/Origin (later ATOS) for several years. There I integrating different pieces of software together–environments and systems that had to work together - and assembling software like Lego blocks became my new focus. Grexx was founded slowly, having met the other co-founders at Origin. Together, we established several companies around creation and implementation of public marketplaces. And although that went well - there was even talk of an IPO - the dotcom crash at the beginning of this century pulled the plug on it."