Nicolas Bettenburg
Finding new ways to power AI-native companies and making human-agent teams hyper-productive. Software engineering research since 2005.
I'm the founder and CEO of KUY.io, a custom software product agency and consultancy, and the maker of the Ai Software Engineering Kit and Exponential, the AI-native product engineering tool for human-agent teams.
I've spent the last 20 years making software development teams more productive: as a CTO at tech startups, as a consultant at organizations and government, and by building in-house tools to make our work at KUY.io more efficient. I write about this work on this blog.
Recently, AI-native companies and mixed human-AI teams are on the top of my mind. I've created the Ai Software Engineering Kit (AiSE) that teaches coding agents a spec-driven software engineering process, and that plugs natively into the world's most used coding agents. Paired with Exponential, the git-native issue tracker for human-agent teams, you can finally evolve past vibe-coding to AI-engineering. I also built AnyMCP, an open-source platform that turns any folder of files and scripts into a live MCP service for AI agents.
Selected Work
- 2026Created Exponential and AnyMCP — Exponential is a git-native issue tracker and product engineering tool built for human-agent teams. AnyMCP is an open-source platform that turns any folder of files and scripts into a live MCP service for AI agents.
- 2025Created AiSE Kit — The Ai Software Engineering Kit teaches coding agents a spec-driven process: the agent decomposes problems, proposes specifications for human review, and plugs natively into the world's most used coding agents.
- 2024Created Codex, Flux, and Citadel — A suite of developer infrastructure products. Codex is a git hosting platform, Flux is an artifact repository for build outputs and packages, and Citadel is a secure shell server for remote access and tunneling.
- 2023Created Wave CI and Meera — Wave CI is a continuous integration and deployment platform with first-class container support. Meera is a project tracking and management tool designed for engineering teams.
- 2021Created Konnect — A self-hosted VPN server for secure networking, built for teams that need simple, reliable private connectivity to their clouds without trusting a third party.
- 2019Joined Quantropi as CTO — Led engineering at a quantum-secure cryptography startup developing post-quantum encryption and key distribution technology.
- 2018Founded KUY.io — A custom software product agency and consultancy helping startups and enterprises build, ship, and scale software products.
- 2016Joined inBay Technologies as CTO — Led engineering for an identity and passwordless authentication platform serving enterprise and government clients.
- 2014Completed PhD — Doctoral research at the Software Intelligence and Analysis Lab at Queen's University in Kingston, Canada. Focused on mining software repositories and improving developer productivity through data-driven insights.
- 2012Internship at Microsoft Research — Research internship working on large-scale empirical software engineering and developer tools.
- 2006Completed MSc Computer Science — Master's degree at Saarland University in Saarbrücken, Germany, with a focus on software engineering and programming languages.
- 2004Completed BSc Computer Science — Bachelor's degree at Saarland University in Saarbrücken, Germany.
Talks and Mentions
Presentations and slide decks are available on SlideShare.
Get in Touch
Drop me a line at nicbet@kuy.io.