A philosopher who ended up building AI and cybersecurity products.

Early

I grew up in the 1980s in a small town in southern Brazil, fewer than six thousand people, watching Star Trek and wanting to be Kirk. I was, pretty obviously, Spock.

Before computers, I took apart every toy I could find. Not to break them — to see what was inside, how the pieces fit, what made them do what they did.

Technology felt like the future arriving from somewhere else. I worked hard enough to buy my first computer around age 12. It was nothing like the Enterprise computer, but I loved it immediately. I learned MS-DOS, then BASIC, then COBOL, then Linux and HTML. The impulse was always the same: not just to use things, but to understand how they worked and push them further.

What I did not know then was that the same impulse would eventually lead me to philosophy, which turns out to be the same operation applied to concepts rather than machines: take them apart, see how the pieces connect, put them back together more carefully.

Academia

I spent more than two decades in academic philosophy, working mainly on epistemology, skepticism, Wittgenstein, Cavell, and philosophy of film. That work took me through UFRGS, Oxford, the University of Chicago, and Leipzig, and eventually into books, teaching, research supervision, and academic leadership.

The return to technology was not a rupture so much as a shift of arena. What carried over was the method: clarifying concepts, testing assumptions, distinguishing weak arguments from strong ones, treating language as something that can either sharpen or distort thought.

Technology, again

At Axur, I have worked on cyber threat intelligence, digital risk protection, and AI-driven product initiatives, including the early direction behind what became the CTI platform, and more recently Command, an experimental conversational AI platform for cybersecurity investigations.

What interests me most is the layer where conceptual clarity meets implementation: where ideas have to survive contact with systems, teams, customers, and adversarial environments.

There is also a loop that closes on the language side. Much of what I worked on in philosophy was language itself — epistemology and philosophy of language: how words carry meaning, what they can and cannot do, how ordinary speech both reveals and obscures thought. Coming back to technology now means arriving at a moment when natural language has become the interface to computation. The prompt is the program. That loop closed somewhere I did not expect.

And somewhere along the way, the Star Trek computer became real. It is not quite the Enterprise yet. But it is close enough that the work feels different now, less like building toward something imagined, and more like figuring out what to do with something that actually arrived.

Currently

At Axur, I work across product strategy, threat intelligence, and AI-driven security products, including a conversational AI platform for security investigations. The role sits at the intersection of product vision, technical depth, and the kind of conceptual translation that my philosophical training turns out to have been preparing me for.

I am also writing as a way of clarifying what remains alive in the encounter between philosophy and AI. The essays on this site are part of that process.

More about my professional background on LinkedIn. To get in touch: hello at jonadas dot com.