Clemens Schröer and Felix Brockmeier, two MISDI 2020 alumni, discuss their time at LSE, the inspiration behind setting up their own business, Lemon AI, and what they have learnt along the way.

How did your time at LSE (Department of Management) contribute to your success/achieving this incredible feat?

Our time at LSE has certainly taught us to approach problems in an analytical way. Start-up life can be messy and feel like a rollercoaster, so being able to see things clearly can be powerful. The LSE network also opened several doors for us, from feedback calls to investor pitches.

What inspired you to set up your business (tell us a bit about your career journey)?

We always dreamed about starting our own company and were already discussing ideas during our studies, which probably explains why we started building our first software product only shortly after handing in our thesis. Before, Felix worked as a software engineer at Berenberg, Deutsche Bank, dSPACE and Atos, while Clemens spent some time in finance at Global Founders Capital and Silverfleet Capital. We initially worked on a problem Felix had experienced at Berenberg but later changed our direction.

What are your plans for the future of Lemon AI?

Before Lemon AI, we built a data observability solution to help Data Engineers working with Snowflake discover data quality issues. Even though we had several paying customers and were able to raise funding, we saw an even bigger opportunity and decided to pivot away from this. Right now, we are looking into how we can support the development and testing of complex LLM applications from an infrastructure perspective. If you work with LLMs as an ML Engineer, Data Scientist or Software Engineer we would love to hear from you – we appreciate any input and feedback on our direction! Going forward, we can see Lemon AI being offered as an open-source solution as we see huge potential in open-source models and the community.

Do you have any advice for current students wishing to set up their own businesses?

Just start! There will never be a perfect moment for this. Also, the likelihood that your first idea will be a success is unfortunately very small. The most important thing is that you follow your interests and you get up again and again.