We combine world-class Economics with bleeding-edge tech
We are a team of doctoral researchers from the London School of Economics, partnered with the European Space Agency. We have published in peer-reviewed journals, designed policies for national governments, and are powered by bleeding-edge tech like Open AI’s GPT-3.
Lars Ludolph
Co-Founder
Lars is an economist whose research specialises in European labour markets, public economics and the political economy of Europe. He has previously worked for the European Commission, the Centre for European Policy Research, and the Central Bank of Malta. His PhD is in Economic Geography from the London School of Economics.
Yohan Iddawela
Executive Director, Co-Founder
Yohan is a development economist. He has previously worked as an economist for the Australian Government and as a consultant for the World Bank, OECD, Afghan Ministry of Finance and the Puerto Rican Office of Management and Budget. He is a Co-Founder and Chairman of data science company, Lanterne.ai. He holds a PhD in Economic Geography from the London School of Economics.
Jon Lo
Co-Founder - Strategy, Tech, Data
Jon is a Forbes 30 under 30 entrepreneur leading 505’s commercialization strategy and synthesisation of traditional economics with the latest tech – particularly in 505’s work with Open AI’s GPT-3. His work has been featured on the BBC, Associated Press, and in multiple podcasts. He holds a MSc in Local Economic Development from LSE.
Sam Watts
Co-Founder
Sam is a lawyer with a background in Commercial and Criminal law. He is qualified as a Solicitor in the UK, and as a Barrister and Solicitor in Australia. He has previously worked as the Crown Prosecutor for East London, co-founded a legal tech start-up and worked in management positions at multiple large organisations.
Mikkel Barslund
Macroeconomist
Mikkel is an economist with extensive experience in think tanks, government and academia. He was previously an Assistant Research Professor in Economics at the University of Copenhagen. Over the past ten years his work has focused primarily on economic policies within the EU. His expertise lies in economic modelling and econometric analysis. Mikkel holds a PhD in Economics from the University of Copenhagen.
Jan Stuckatz
Data Scientist
Jan is a data scientist who specialises in machine learning and natural language processing. Jan was previously a Postdoctoral Research Fellow in Political Economy at the Toulouse School of Economics, and holds a PhD from the London School of Economics.
Advisors
Kiran Modi
Strategic Advisor
Kiran has a background as a management consultant having worked for McKinsey in the Middle East primarily in their digital business building practice. He also has a strong background in Economics, having worked at the HM Treasury, and having studied PPE at Oxford followed by a Masters from UChicago where he was on a full ride scholarship.
We build off the institutional knowledge from the #1 Department in Economic Geography in the world
As of June 2021, the Department of Geography and Environment at LSE is the #1 ranked institution in Economic Geography worldwide
We calculate GDP by transforming satellite imagery using deep learning
Transforming night lights from satellite imagery to GDP was pioneered by a LSE professor from our Department in 2012 in the American Economic Review, the world’s top economic journal. Since then, thousands of papers of peer-reviewed work has been published on transforming luminosity to GDP, all of which find a very strong relationship between these two variables. We further improve on the literature by combining traditional academic approaches with our proprietary machine learning algorithms.
