Shuttle wants to redefine what 'smart' means in AI
The AI Pitch Competition spotlights the most innovative AI solutions, offering startups the opportunity to accelerate their growth.
Published on November 5, 2025
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Eight ambitious AI startups have been selected to compete in the AI Pitch Competition. The finals are on November 13, 2025, and IO+ will portray each contestant in the run-up to that event. The AI Pitch Competition is a Brabant-based contest that highlights the most innovative AI solutions, offering startups the opportunity to present their ideas, connect with industry leaders, and accelerate their growth. Today, we show what Shuttle has in store for the world. Niels Monsieurs answers our questions.
What specific AI technology is at the core of your solution?
"At the core of Shuttle is an AI creative assistant designed to make delivering creative work easier whilst keeping valuable intellectual property private. We combine AI processing with a platform that ensures creative work isn't used to train AI or sold to third parties and does not process any metadata without your consent. Unlike traditional platforms that trade privacy for convenience, Shuttle’s AI is designed around productivity and control."
How scalable is your AI solution?
"Shuttle is built for a global scale. The platform already serves creators and studios worldwide through an architecture that efficiently handles large volumes of creative assets. The main challenge ahead lies in maintaining low latency while expanding AI use."
How does your startup address potential ethical concerns related to bias, fairness, or transparency in AI decision-making?
"Privacy and productivity are at the heart of Shuttle’s design philosophy. Our AI features are transparent by default: users always know what happens to their assets. We avoid black-box models and don't train AI on the creative work of our users."
In what ways do you believe your AI solution can positively impact society?
"We believe creatives should be able to share their work without giving up their intellectual property. By offering a private alternative to the productivity gains AI delivers, Shuttle empowers a more ethical creative economy: one where control and transparency belong to the author or creator of a work. The challenge lies in awareness: helping users understand that privacy and convenience can coexist."
Tell us more about your entrepreneurial journey
"Our biggest hurdle was convincing early users that AI for creative workflows can be safe and transparent. We overcame it by obsessing over user experience - proving that speed, simplicity, and privacy don’t have to compete. The current AI landscape validated our approach: creatives are more conscious than ever about how their work can be both easier and safer."
How are you preparing for the growing regulatory frameworks around AI, such as the GDPR, the AI Act, and other data privacy laws?
"Shuttle was designed from day one to comply with GDPR and upcoming frameworks like the EU AI Act. We don’t profile users, and we don't sell or transfer data. Every feature we build passes through a privacy impact review before launch, ensuring that compliance and innovation go hand in hand rather than standing in each other’s way."
Future vision: What is your long-term vision for your AI solution?
"Over the next 5 years, we see Shuttle becoming the preferred way to deliver creative work - a tool that not only gives creatives instant control over how and where their work is shared, but also produces their deliverables from strategic and conceptual input. Our AI will evolve to make sharing smarter (not nosier): assisting with asset production, organisation, and delivery while keeping users fully in control."
What opportunities does your location give you? What is still missing in the ecosystem you are part of?
"Being based in the Netherlands gives us access to a strong design and tech culture that values privacy, ethics, and creativity - a rare combination. The ecosystem is growing fast, but we’d love to see more collaboration between early-stage AI startups and creative industries to accelerate privacy-first innovation."
The AI Pitch Competition: Why will you win this contest?
"We’ll win because we’re redefining what 'smart' means in AI. Shuttle shows that intelligence doesn’t require surveillance - it just requires better design."