Heuristic Systems Inc
The company behind the three platforms
apto began with a single, stubborn observation: the education system is remarkably good at failing the people it is meant to serve, and remarkably bad at noticing.
Our story
It is an observation our founder, Gabriel Hoffman, lived from both sides. Growing up in 1980s South Africa, the standard response to a bored or difficult student was punishment. Gabriel was that student.
Eventually, the fear of failing a diploma he could barely afford forced him to invent his own method: pre-read everything, own the material, and arrive ready. He went from the back of the class to the top of it, sparking an MBA and a career in audit and corporate governance. Years later, when his son and then Gabriel himself was diagnosed as neurodivergent, the rest of the puzzle fell into place. The system does not merely fail bored, bright children; it mislabels the ones it least understands, treating brilliant fish as if they are failing at climbing trees.
But building the solution is not the story of just one person.
Nor, in the end, was it the story of just one product. The complaint about education, that it reports completion because completion is easy to count and stays quiet about whether anything was learned, turned out to be the shape of a far more common failure. Research reports a ranking and stays quiet about the evidence beneath it. Delivery reports progress and stays quiet about whether the work was worth doing. In each case a confident answer is offered and the reasoning behind it is unavailable.
So we built the other two. Heuristic Research Systems applies the same discipline to evidence, and Heuristic Planning Systems applies it to priority. Three platforms, one refusal: never to ask anyone to trust a conclusion they cannot examine.
- 5
- Founders
- 3
- Continents
- 150+
- Years combined experience
The foundations: lived experience meets academic rigour
In 2003, Gabriel stepped away from a senior corporate career in search of a quieter life in the Western Cape. While working to turn around failing tech projects, he met Adheesh, now Associate Professor (Dr.) Adheesh Budree. What began as a meeting of two restless minds developed over twenty years into a close intellectual partnership.
As an experienced scholar and programme leader in Information Systems, Adheesh brought the academic foundations needed to transform Gabriel’s lived experience into a rigorous model for personalised learning. Having spent his career examining how people develop capabilities in rapidly changing environments across AI, analytics, and tech-enabled education, Adheesh’s expertise shaped apto’s core philosophy: learning pathways must respond to the individual, rather than forcing every learner through the same rigid sequence.
Under Adheesh’s doctoral supervision, Gabriel’s practical insights gained an academic spine. Together, their partnership provided apto with its intellectual credibility, resulting in a deeply researched doctoral thesis addressing a fundamental question: what does an AI-mediated learning system owe each student?
The catalyst: engineering for reality
In 2020, just as the pandemic forced the world to turn inward, Esther Haines joined the story. Sheltering together during the global turmoil proved to be the ideal space for ideas to take flight. As Gabriel’s formal research began to mature, the vision for apto started to take shape.
As a citizen scientist and a passionate educator of young engineers, Esther believes that mastering the basic, often overlooked foundations of knowledge is the key to true understanding. With her global background in data analytics, mining, and project management, her role naturally evolved into holding the build to a world-class engineering standard and running apto’s delivery and operations.
When the research led to the inevitable question of how to turn this theory into a tangible reality, Esther knew exactly who to call.
The architecture: enterprise-grade security and scale
To build a platform of this scale, the team needed elite technical leadership. Esther reached out to Zane West, a veteran who has spent over two decades leading top-tier product, engineering, and go-to-market teams in cybersecurity. Having also served as a CISO in the cloud services sector, Zane brought a firsthand understanding of how to protect digital environments. As the owner of apto, Zane handles the heavy lifting behind the scenes, spearheading the platform’s architecture, design, build, and governance.
When the team needed an expert advisor to solidify the system’s core, Zane turned to “the smartest person he knows.”
Enter Istvan Berko, a heavy hitter in global AI security and cyber innovation. Rooted in a background of hyperscale cloud and global managed services, Istvan co-authored the very cloud security and governance frameworks used across the tech industry today. As a co-founder of Heuristic Systems, Istvan engineered our groundbreaking agent architecture from scratch. Today, he champions our commitment to ethics and security by personally driving our responsible AI, privacy, and safety standards.
What an AI learning system owes the student
The answer extends far beyond personalisation as a simple algorithmic exercise. It demands that a system recognises a learner’s existing knowledge, aspirations, circumstances, and unique pace. It requires that recommendations are completely transparent, human agency is preserved, and genuine capability is nurtured.
What each member of this team had seen separately in their careers pointed to the exact same conclusion: you cannot bolt governance onto a system that was never designed for it.
So we built apto the other way around. The platform features:
- Student-owned data privacy models
- An ethics gate with absolute veto power
- Six non-compensatory governance gates
- Human oversight at every single stage
All of this is securely grounded in doctoral research at the Da Vinci Institute, backed by more than 1,300 academic sources.
Today, five founders across three continents are building apto. With more than 150 years of combined experience in education, engineering, security, product development and research, shipping enterprise cloud, cybersecurity and educational technology, we are building it for every student the old system left behind.
The team
Five founders with more than 150 years of combined experience across education, engineering, security, product and research.
Gabriel Hoffman
Founder, Thought Leader & Developer · South Africa
Doctoral candidate (DMTI, Da Vinci Institute), MBA and Certified Internal Auditor, with over 30 years across higher education, information systems, risk and audit. His thesis is the research apto is built on, and he built its agents.
Zane West
President, Product Owner & Developer · United States
A product leader with 30+ years industry experience, he has brought security products to market at global cybersecurity vendors, formerly a CISO with an MSc in Cybersecurity. He engineered apto’s agent architecture and governance and owns the product.
Istvan Berko
Chief Technology Officer, AI Security & Responsible AI · United States
27 years in enterprise cybersecurity, MSc in Cybersecurity, now a global head of AI security and cyber innovation, and co-author of cloud security and governance guidance used across the industry. He engineered apto’s agent architecture and owns its responsible-AI and safety standards.
Adheesh Budree
Chief Education & Research · India
A professor of information systems, economics and education, and a design-thinking coach. He has 11 years industry experience across Africa and the Middle East and 14 years in academia, spanning Africa, India and the UK. Gabriel’s doctoral supervisor, he anchors apto’s academic research in socio-economics and ICT4D.
Esther Haines
Chief Operating Officer · South Africa
An engineer and educator with 3 decades of global industry experience, delivering data analytics and complex engineering programmes to clients in the mining industry. She brings engineering rigour to apto’s build and runs its delivery and operations.