Company leader
Stefan Bunk
Co-founder and CTO
Vara
Stefan Bunk is the co-founder and chief technology officer of Vara, a Berlin company whose AI helps radiologists read screening mammograms. He leads the technology and machine learning work behind its screening platform.
From a Village Near Leipzig
He grew up in a small village near Leipzig, Germany, and in 2010 began studying computer science at the Hasso Plattner Institute in Potsdam, next to Berlin. He earned bachelor's and master's degrees there with distinction.
Health interested him from the start, and he worked with Berlin's Charité hospital during his studies. "So this intersection of health and machine learning was always very interesting to me."
Applied Research
While studying he worked in applied research teams at SAP and Here Maps. He also spent time as a research fellow at the Vienna University of Economics and Business.
After his degrees he weighed a PhD against a startup and ruled out a corporate job quickly. "I always was very impact-driven", he said, and he chose the startup path because it promised impact sooner.
Merantix and Vara
He joined Merantix, a Berlin venture studio for AI companies, in 2017 as one of its first employees and helped build its machine learning stack. There he met Jonas Muff, and after a year of testing ideas the two founded Vara in 2018.
His stated ambition for Vara is simple: "Our ambition is to find every deadly breast cancer early." He favors running new AI in shadow mode before it goes live and watching it closely afterward. "We believe there must be strong processes around it wherever you will deploy your AI."