BottleCap AI
Chief Scientific Officer
Tomas is a world-renowned AI researcher. The creator of word2vec, which proposed how machines could understand human language, laying the foundation for modern AI applications from neural language models in 2007 and his RNNLM toolkit was the first to demonstrate the capability to train language models on large corpora, resulting in large improvements over the state of the art. He has been researching under Facebook, Google and Microsoft.
Chief Executive Officer
Jaroslav is an entrepreneur, Co-founder of Beat Games, studio behind the biggest VR game to date - Beat Saber (10M+ copies sold), Jaroslav initiated acquisition by Meta in 2019 and continued steering the studio post-exit. After leaving Meta in 2023, he invested in projects driving global positive impact in tech and multiple other fields.
Senior Scientist & Head of Development
David is an AI researcher specializing in advanced language modeling and generative AI. He co-founded an algorithmic trading venture alongside Tomas Mikolov. His work has appeared in top-tier conferences (ICLR, ECAI).
“At BottleCap AI, our goal is to develop a new generation of large language models — the backbone of what we call “AI” today — with efficiency as a core operational principle.”
We focus on architecture-first, efficiency-focused foundational LLMs, designed to reason better per unit of compute and unlock applications that were previously impractical.
Our team combines deep research and real product development under one roof. If something works in the lab, we ship it into an application right away. BottleCap AI was initially bootstrapped by Jaroslav Beck and Tomas Mikolov.
Once it became clear that the team could move fast and ship real products, we brought in strategic partners to accelerate development — with 20VC leading our seed round alongside world-class founders from companies including Lovable, ElevenLabs, Datadog, Hugging Face, Canva, Supercell, and others.
The name BottleCap is a tongue-in-cheek reference to a meme comparing European innovation to tethered bottle caps, in contrast to SpaceX rockets. While exaggerated, it reflects a real challenge: innovation in Europe can move slower than it should due to heavy regulation.
AI is the defining technology of the 21st century. For Europe to remain competitive, it will take bold ideas, relentless execution, and world-class talent.
One of our core aims at BottleCap is efficiency in AI. To fulfil this mission, we fine-tuned Qwen3.6-27B to reduce unnecessary reasoning while preserving answer quality.
The result:
Across twelve out-of-domain benchmarks, the model produced nearly identical accuracy while using roughly half as many thinking tokens.
We are releasing the model publicly on HuggingFace under a permissive Apache 2.0 licence. Anyone can freely download the model and instantly replace their local Qwen model to save money & time.
“We are looking for the most motivated scientists and product builders who are passionate about LLMs and turning research into real, useful applications. We want people ready to do the best work of their lives — helping Europe deliver world-class innovation in AI efficiency on a global stage.”
If you’re a researcher, engineer, or builder passionate about creating the future of AI, join us. We’re hiring!
