40 | Focus on AI:
AHX.ai
TRANSPARENT AI AI: RADICALLY Artificial Intelligence (AI) is increasingly taking a more prominent role in wood-based
panels production. One of the companies operating in this space is London-based
AHX.ai. Stephen Powney interviewed the company’s CEO, Haidin Rashid Amin
Above:
AHX.ai CEO Haidin Raishid Amin speaking at the 2024 International Wood Based Panels Symposium Above:
AHX.ai partner Adrien Hitz
I company
AHX.ai, a manufacturing intelligence company, has a mission to transform efficiencies in the wood-based panels manufacturing industry. The company had an unusual beginning. Haidin Rashid Amin, CEO of the company, was actually involved in developing a new adhesive for the industry after his studies at Imperial College, London. Mr Rashid Amin, with a background in engineering, design and innovation, was exploring the possibility of building a new type of adhesive from micro-organisms, an alternative to the bio-based and lignin/ tannin-based adhesives that have entered the sector. In theory, the content for adhesives can be found in micro-organisms, promising unlimited production through fermentation. It was 2017 and the fledgling project won a few grants from Dyson and Shell LiveWire. He joined an accelerator company, Deep Science Adventures, where he joined up with Adrien Hitz, who had just finished his PhD at
A WBPI | October/November 2025 |
www.wbpionline.com
Oxford University. Mr Hitz had carried out research on predicting the performance of steel coils in a steel manufacturing process with machine learning models. “If you want to develop the adhesives and optimise them you need to understand the manufacturing process inside and out,” explained Mr Rashid Amin. “Years on and thousands of experiments
later we had developed an adhesive that was quite impressive in that the pressing time was close to UF and ready to commercialise it. But we needed a lot of investment.” Ultimately, the adhesives business was transferred to Canadian biotechnology company Lallemand in 2021, which is currently conducting numerous trials with the technology.
It was the thorough research of wood- based panels production processes for the adhesive, with the accumulation of data, that directly led to a pivot in the two men’s approach and ultimately to the birth of
AHX.ai.
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