Mathias Lechner is Co-Founder and CTO of Liquid AI, an MIT CSAIL spinout building efficient foundation models that run on CPUs and edge devices. He is also a Research Affiliate at MIT CSAIL, where he collaborates with Prof. Daniela Rus.

Mathias earned his bachelor's (2016) and master's (2017) degrees in Computer Science at TU Wien, then completed his PhD at the Institute of Science and Technology Austria in 2022 under Tom Henzinger. He later worked as a Postdoctoral Associate at MIT CSAIL on robust and trustworthy machine learning.

Mathias began working with Daniela Rus in 2017 on what became Liquid Neural Networks, and he co-authored the foundational Liquid Time-Constant Networks research. He received the 2023 Outstanding Scientific Achievement Award at ISTA and a 2022 HPC Innovation Excellence Award, and is a frequent TEDx speaker.

Mathias co-founded Liquid AI in 2023 with Ramin Hasani, Alexander Amini and Daniela Rus. The company raised a $250M Series A led by AMD Ventures in December 2024 at a valuation of about $2.35B, following a seed round of roughly $37.6M in 2023.

Liquid AI launched its first Liquid Foundation Models in September 2024 and now releases LFM2 language models that outperform similar-sized models such as Llama3 and Qwen3 in speed and performance. His research has appeared in Nature Machine Intelligence and at NeurIPS, ICML and ICLR.