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auticon was founded in Berlin in 2011 by a father wanting better employment opportunities for his autistic son. Autistic professionals were employed as quality assurance consultants, debugging Websites and applications. As Managing Director of a small investment firm, Kurt Schöffer was approached by Ananda Social Venture Fund, who invited him to partner in creating Germany’s first social impact fund. The fund’s first investment was in auticon, where Kurt served as an advisor on the fund’s behalf. For Kurt, this was an opportunity to apply his business acumen to solve the social issue of rising unemployment among autistic adults, who often possess STEM skills applicable in a range of technology careers. After three months as an advisor, Kurt accepted a role as auticon’s Group CEO, later developing its 6 German office locations and expanding into Paris and London. The company added major clients such as BMW and Allianz, and new technology consulting services.

In 2016, Sir Richard Branson’s investment brought international attention to the company as it expanded into Italy and Switzerland. In 2018 auticon acquired two North American autism employers: MindSpark in Los Angeles and Meticulon in Calgary, later adding clients such as Salesforce and Deloitte and surpassing 200+ autistic employees globally. In 2019, auticon opened in Australia with one of the island’s largest employers.

In 2023, auticon and Unicus entered an agreement under which the two companies would unite. The historic deal established a global model for an autistic-majority social enterprise and ESG company, addressing the inequalities in employment for neurodivergent adults. The two combined companies became the largest autistic-majority company in the world, with 81% of its 600 employees on the autism spectrum across 15 countries.

Press Contact

Thank you for your interest in covering auticon. I look forward to speaking with you.

Mercedes de Graaff
Email: moc.n1783879559ocitu1783879559a@ffa1783879559arged1783879559.sede1783879559crem1783879559
Location: London, UK
Current Timezone: British Standard Time (BST)
Language spoken: English

Publications

auticon’s Global Impact Reports

2024 Global Impact Report

2023 Global Impact Report

2022 Global Impact Report

2021 Global Impact Report (Published 2022)

2021 Global Impact Report (Languages: Italian,  English, and German)

2021 Global Impact Report (Languages: French, English, German)

2020 Global Impact Report (Languages: French, English, German)

 

auticon + Deloitte Report, “Embracing Neurodiversity at Work” 2022

A new report by Deloitte Canada and auticon Canada finds employment barriers, lack of workplace support for Canada’s autistic community. The joint report surveyed 454 adults across the country.

2022 auticon + Deloitte Report, “Embracing Neurodiversity at Work” (English)

A posted image from LinkedIn showing a journalistic story called "Supporting neurodiversity at work"

News Coverage

Richard Branson-backed Auticon offering Irish firms neurodiversity in hiring

Business Post

auticon makes Newsweek's list of most loved places to work

Newsweek

almost half of affected workers don’t disclose neurodiversity

The Irish Independant

Behaviors That Can Undermine Team Dynamics In The Workplace

Forbes

Impact investors join forces to back largest autistic-majority company

Impact Investor

Auticon, la consulenza in mano a esperti autistici. “Sfatiamo il mito che sono ...

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Announcements

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Why Your Medical AI Model Breaks in Production

A diagnostic AI system achieves 94% accuracy in clinical trials. The procurement team signs off. The system goes live across a hospital network. Six months later, a review finds it has been systematically underperforming on a specific patient cohort, one that was underrepresented in the original training data. The cases it missed were not random. They were predictable. And they had consequences. This is not a hypothetical. Variants of this failure pattern have been documented across medical AI deployments globally,...
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Your AI Model Is Only As Compliant As The Data Behind It

What is the EU AI Act? The EU AI Act is the world’s first comprehensive legal framework for artificial intelligence. Enacted in 2024 and now progressively entering into force, it classifies AI systems by risk level and assigns obligations accordingly – to developers, deployers, and the suppliers whose work feeds into AI systems. At its core, the Act is designed to protect three things: people’s fundamental rights, including privacy, dignity, and protection from discrimination. The integrity of decisions that affect...
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neuroinclusion services

The Human In The Loop Isn’t Optional

There’s a version of the AI conversation where the machine handles everything and humans step back. It’s a compelling pitch. It’s also how organisations end up with models that perform well in test environments, only to fail in daily practice because they were never sufficiently fine-tuned on the edge cases the real world introduces. Human-in-the-loop (HITL) is the methodology that prevents that failure mode. And how you staff it matters more than most AI implementation frameworks currently acknowledge. What HITL...
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What Does it Mean to be a Neurodivergent Professional?

Somewhere between 15% and 20% of the global population is neurodivergent. That’s a significant portion of every workforce, every leadership team, every industry, and every profession, whether or not it’s visible, disclosed, or understood. And yet the conversation about neurodivergent professionals is still dominated by a narrow set of assumptions: that neurodivergence needs to be “managed,” that disclosure is a risk, and that the primary question is one of accommodation. This framing focuses on categorisation and misses what is more...
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A person sits in a modern chair within a wildflower meadow, gazing thoughtfully into a forest-like digital landscape. Layers of softly glowing computer code appear suspended among the trees, blending technology with nature. Sunlight filters through the scene, creating a calm and reflective atmosphere that symbolises human insight, judgement and collaboration with artificial intelligence.

What Is Edge Thinking? auticon’s Lens on Cognitive Diversity at Work

If you have come across auticon, you may have wondered what we mean when we talk about “Edge Thinking”. It is a term we use deliberately. This post explains what it means, where the idea comes from, and why ‘Edge Thinking’ is specifically critical for organisations keen to have a competitive edge in the ever-changing technology, data and AI landscape. The one-line answer Edge Thinking is the value created when different cognitive styles work together. It is auticon’s lens on...
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Why Data Annotation is the Engine of Every Supervised Learning AI System

Think about how a child learns to read. A parent points to a dog and says “dog.” Then again, with a different dog. And again, with a picture of one. The child doesn’t receive a definition; they receive labeled examples, repeated until the pattern clicks. That is supervised learning. And it is precisely how modern AI systems are trained. AI is everywhere: routing customer service calls, flagging anomalies in medical scans, navigating vehicles through city traffic. Behind every capable AI...
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