A software company that was born building artificial intelligence.

Roots: code learned the hard way

Iván Londoño wrote his first program at age 10, on a Commodore and entirely on his own. He never went to university: everything he knows he learned by solving real problems. In 2000 he built one of the first working chatbots in Spanish.

In 2003, at Zona Virtual, he worked on the PSE online payment button and on Plaza Orbital, one of Colombia’s first online stores. He later joined Intergrupo and led teams at Católica del Norte and at the IME School of Systems.

Claudia Ramírez, a systems engineer, came from several years in call centers serving users. From there she brought something that still defines the company: designing for the person who uses the system.

SOLUTECIA is born, and with it an AI that talks

In January 2009 we launched SOF.I.A. (Software de Inteligencia Artificial, Spanish for “Artificial Intelligence Software”), the engine now called AI-IA. It learned from every conversation, spoke 33 languages and appeared as a 3D avatar.

That year we took it to the 2nd Inventors and High Technology Fair, became Cultura E finalists and presented it at Andicom in Cartagena. In November SOLUTECIA S.A.S. was incorporated, and in December we won Medellín’s 8th Business Plan Competition, which opened the door to support from Ruta N, Creame, Proantioquia and Parque E.

From the lab to the market

In 2010 the newspaper El Colombiano published “Sofía lo asiste, pero no intente confundirla” (“Sofía assists you, but don’t try to confuse her”), an article about our AI after its showing at the Createc fair. That year we also pitched it to the Ángeles Inversionistas angel network in Bogotá and at investor sessions in Medellín.

Ruta N, new editions of Createc and BarCamp followed, while the company grew with projects for education and research institutions. In 2015 we added blockchain: smart contracts, tokenization and cryptocurrency payments.

Global scale and AI agents

Since 2018 we have built four telemedicine platforms for the U.S. and Nigeria. In this stage we also built document security with biometric validation and Carbon2O2’s carbon credit trading platform.

Today our engine is called AI-IA, and we build language-model agents for clients in 8 countries. Iván advises the Digital Business Cluster Council of the Medellín Chamber of Commerce. See the full timeline →