Reinhard Heckel is Co-Founder of Grubel, a Munich- and Tubingen-based AI research lab building systems that automate AI specialisation for complex legal work.

Reinhard earned his PhD in electrical engineering at ETH Zurich, receiving the ETH Zurich medal for an outstanding thesis, and later completed a postdoctoral fellowship at UC Berkeley's AI Research Lab.

Reinhard is a tenured Associate Professor of Machine Learning at TUM and adjunct faculty at Rice University, with research spanning deep learning, data-centric ML, medical imaging, and DNA data storage.

Before academia, Reinhard was a researcher at IBM Research Zurich; he has contributed to landmark open-source projects including DataComp-LM and OpenThoughts, and published extensively at top venues such as NeurIPS and ICLR.

Grubel raised 3 million euros in pre-Seed funding led by Point Nine, with backing from angel investors including Jeff Dean, Chris Re, Ion Stoica, and the co-founders of Harvey, positioning the company at the frontier of legal AI research.