Max Duursma
Co-founder & CEO
Leads Cornu's company strategy, partnerships and business development.
Cornu — Physical world intelligence
Intelligence for the physical world.
Cornu builds world models that help autonomous systems perceive, understand and navigate the environments around them.
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Cornu in motion
From waterway
to world model.
A visualisation of how vessels, bridges and waterways become a shared spatial model.
Autonomous systems cannot navigate a world they don't understand.
Seeing is not enough.
They need context.
They need memory.
They need a world model.
01 — The system
From observation
to understanding.
Cornu brings sensor data, charts and past observations into one world model. Updated as conditions change. Built for decisions on the water.
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Perception
Detect and track vessels, infrastructure and the shoreline across sensor streams.
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Spatial understanding
Resolve positions, clearances and navigable space in a common frame.
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World model
Keep a persistent view of what is here, what has changed and what came before.
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Intelligence
Anticipate vessel motion, potential conflicts and conditions along the route.
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Autonomy
Support the crew today. Build towards automated control on the same foundation.
Built from
Explore the world model
Camera, radar & AIS Position & telemetry Environment, charts & history
02 — First deployment
We start on the water.
Cornu's first platform gives inland vessels a continuously updated understanding of the environment around them — bridges, locks, traffic, channel and shoreline, in daylight and at night.
InfrastructureVessel trackNavigable corridorClearance
03 — Product
Bridge awareness. Built for inland vessels.
Bridge Watch measures the opening ahead, compares it with your vessel’s air draft, and gives the crew a clear margin before the approach.
First product · available for pilot
Read about Bridge Watch →
Bridge Watch
Mast-mounted sensing and onboard compute, calibrated to your vessel.
- Live clearance
- Vessel-specific margin
- Timely alerts
04 — Compounding
One vessel sees a waterway.
VESSELS ONLINE · 001
Every Cornu deployment can improve the intelligence available to the wider network. A bridge is not observed once. Over a year of traffic it is observed thousands of times, in every light and water level.
01More vessels
02More observations
03Better world model
04Better models
05Better product
06 ↻More vessels
05 — Representation
The world doesn't stand still.
Neither should the map.
A chart describes where things were. Cornu is built to describe what exists now, how it has changed, and what is likely to happen next.
Passage 001
0 obs
World model / In motion
From one vessel
to a shared world.
A concept view of vessels, infrastructure and movement connected in one spatial model.
06 — Live system
See the world model think.
Step onto the bridge of a simulated 100-metre inland vessel. Explore how Cornu turns imperfect camera, radar, LiDAR and AIS observations into a persistent model of the waterway.
Launch simulation ↗︎Explore six simulated scenarios
07 — Architecture
One stack, from sensor to decision.
Physical
Marine-grade enclosures and an onboard compute unit sized for continuous operation. Installed per vessel, calibrated per hull.
Perception
Models trained on inland waterway conditions rather than road scenes — reflection, glare, fog, night operation, low-contrast water surfaces.
World model
A shared representation that persists between passages and between vessels, updated as observations arrive and reconciled against charts, water levels and notices.
Intelligence
Warnings, clearance and timing support, route intelligence and fleet-level analytics — delivered onboard and to shore.
Applications
Maritime products sit on top of a general architecture. Other domains reuse the layers beneath rather than starting again.
08 — Direction
One intelligence architecture. Many physical systems.
Waterways are the beginning. The problem underneath is the same everywhere: a machine has to build and keep an accurate understanding of the space it operates in.
Inland vessels
Perception, navigation intelligence and pilot deployments with commercial operators.
Ports & infrastructure
Fixed observation points and change detection along quays, locks and bridges.
Industrial robotics
The same spatial layer applied to machines operating in structured industrial space.
Mobility
Shared world-model infrastructure for vehicles and autonomous platforms.
Wearable perception
Consent-based human observation networks contributing to compatible representations.
Labels are literal. Only work marked in deployment is available to customers today.
A world understood
by machines.
Continuously observed.
Continuously modelled.
Continuously understood.
CORNU
09 — Company
A curated team, close to the water.
Based in Groningen, the Netherlands, Cornu is built by a founding team working across technology, business and marketing. We test on working vessels, in the conditions the system has to survive.
Founded2026
BasedGroningen, NL
Team4 people
FocusInland maritime
The team
04 members
Damien Dufour
Co-founder & CTO
Leads Cornu's technology, engineering and product architecture.
Roeland Duursma
Co-founder & Marketing Director
Leads Cornu's marketing, communications and brand development.
Gerard Mampaey
Co-founder & Investor
Supports Cornu's growth as an investor and strategic co-founder.
Collaboration partners
Building the future together.
University of Groningen
AutoMooring Solutions03open vacancies
Careers / Groningen
Build what comes next.
From perception to the systems that connect it all. Find your place in the team building intelligence for the physical world.
View vacancies10 — Contact Cornu
Let’s start a conversation.
Have a question, an idea or something you would like to discuss? Get in touch about our products, a collaboration, or anything else. We would like to hear from you.