Artificial intelligence has mostly been used to automate manual tasks, but it can also become a medium for how human knowledge itself is captured and shared.
One company attempting to showcase this is Delphi, a platform that turns professional expertise into interactive, 24/7 digital minds. By collecting a person’s written, spoken, or recorded content, Delphi creates “living profiles” that reflect how they think and respond, allowing others to get a better grasp of their knowledge long after it’s been created.
Guiding much of this effort is Basten Heutink, Delphi’s Chief of Staff. Drawing from a background in law and public administration, as well as a track record of scaling startups to multimillion-dollar revenue, Heutink now leads the operational and strategic workings behind the company, helping guide its bold vision to long-term business growth.
Inside The Startup Building Digital Minds
The market for AI-driven products has only grown over the past few years, with roughly a third of all startup funding (more than $100 billion) flowing to AI-related companies last year. This boom has created space for platforms that could make knowledge accessible on demand, turning expertise itself into a living, evolving asset.
Delphi’s one of the few startups operating squarely within this space, a platform helping professionals extend the reach of their thinking through its “living profiles.” The process begins when users upload existing content of theirs (academic articles, videos, and even live feeds) into the platform. The system then learns their speaking tone, mannerisms, and logic, creating a digital mind that can effectively mirror how they think and communicate. Once this living profile is trained, other users can freely interact with it, ask questions, and get responses that reflect the creator’s specific perspective.
By giving worldwide users access to digital versions of founders, investors, or creators, Delphi turns static credentials into a dynamic experience. As Chief of Staff, Basten Heutink summarizes the company’s ambition succinctly: “We want Delphi to be the go-to channel for experts to scale what they know, not just show what they’ve done.”
How Basten Heutink Leads Growth At Delphi
Before joining Delphi, Heutink had already built a reputation for operational precision and growth discipline. A law graduate from Oxford with a double master’s in Public Administration and Global Affairs from the London School of Economics and the University of Toronto, he transitioned from policy to startups early in his career. At Clipbook, a vertical AI company for PR and communications teams, he joined on the founding team and was in charge of functions like sales, marketing, and client success, gaining a first-hand view of what it takes to build a revenue-generating operation.
Now at Delphi, Heutink’s remit is to ensure the company’s rapid growth remains coordinated and sustainable. He oversees internal systems that keep departments connected as the team scales, introducing frameworks for recruitment and talent retention designed for high-growth conditions. He also works to ensure that the strategic pillars get executed and that each team understands how its goals tie back to their larger mission.
That same operational lens extends into how he approaches the market. Leading the company’s revenue planning and go-to-market execution, Heutink’s work involves overseeing the design of systems that enable both consumer adoption and enterprise-level partnerships — particularly with experts and talent agencies whose influence accelerates user growth. By building and maintaining these relationships early, he aims to position the company within trusted networks that already value expertise as currency.
As Heutink describes it. “We aim to align our go-to-market playbook with growth metrics and long-term sustainability, and that’s all about building internal processes that let us move quickly without losing what makes us credible in the first place.”
Navigating Investor Relationships
Heutink also oversees one of Delphi’s most crucial functions: managing relationships with investors. He’s responsible for preparing board materials, coordinating investor updates, and developing financial narratives that are in tune with the company’s progress and market positioning. Since all funding milestones are built on careful timing, Heutink plays a central role in determining when conditions are right to raise, how to structure the narrative around Delphi’s traction, and which investors can add strategic value beyond capital.
He maintains a regular cadence of updates to keep investors informed not only of metrics and milestones but of the company’s strategic direction, all in the hopes of building trust to keep the company’s backers aligned with its long-term mission. “Fundraising is about timing and trust — communicating a clear mission while building confidence for the long term,” he explains, emphasizing that investor confidence comes from clarity as much as results.
That same rigor extends internally. Following Delphi’s recent $16 million Series A funding round from Sequoia, Heutink established new systems for board preparation and reporting, standardizing the way data moves from department leads to executive summaries. The goal is to establish a feedback loop where investor insights inform operational priorities and vice versa.
“It’s not just about knowing the rules,” he says. “It’s about building internal systems that prevent fires before they start.”
Expanding How Professionals Communicate
In the years ahead, Heutink envisions Delphi becoming a global platform where anyone can preserve and share their knowledge in an interactive form. His focus is on turning that ambition into measurable progress: refining internal systems, deepening strategic partnerships, and making the company appealing to established experts and emerging voices alike.
For Heutink, success means building a company that can make expertise itself more accessible, enduring, and valuable. “The future belongs to whoever can make what they know truly useful to others,” he says.
With leaders like Basten Heutink guiding its strategy and structure, Delphi is positioned to continue growing as AI finds new use cases across different industries, helping professionals across all industries find new ways to communicate with people all over the world.
