# About me Meet Sebastian Brandes, a Copenhagen-based entrepreneur, developer, and instrument-rated private pilot. Read about his startups, life abroad, and flying. Author: Sebastian Brandes Canonical: https://brandes.aero/about/ [![Sebastian Brandes wearing an aviation headset in a small airplane.]()]() I’m Sebastian Brandes, and I live in Copenhagen with my wife Andrea and our two daughters, Amelia and Isabella. I am deeply passionate about technology, particularly the web. When I was about ten, I got into web development because I wanted a homepage for my Counter-Strike clan, Team TaZ. I started putting one together in Microsoft FrontPage 98, and when I wanted to add a tag wall where people could leave messages, I began learning ASP. Before I knew it, I was spending hours and hours building interactive websites. Along the way, I got to know other people who shared that interest, first on the Danish forums Solutions2all.dk and Udvikleren.dk, and later on Stack Overflow. ## From Aarhus to Mexico and Madrid For a long time, development was simply something I did for fun. Around the time I turned 19, though, I started becoming interested in the business side of startups too. That led me to study Economics and Business Administration at Aarhus University in 2008, picking it over computer science, as I already felt like I had a good grasp of software development (even though the only things I could really develop were Microsoft Access-backed websites in VBScript). Via Aarhus University, I had the opportunity to spend an exchange semester at Tec de Monterrey in Mexico. That semester turned out to be one of the best parts of my time at university. I became fascinated by Latin culture and the Spanish language and came home wanting to spend more time abroad. When it was time to choose a master’s degree, I decided to move to Madrid. In Spain, I learned to speak Spanish fluently and met Andrea. In 2013, we moved together to Copenhagen, where I started my first full-time job at Microsoft through the Microsoft Academy for College Hires program. After all those years of making websites and writing code as a hobby, I was now developing software professionally. ## Building businesses After three and a half years at Microsoft, I left to start Sensomind with three PhD co-founders. We built computer vision solutions using deep learning, and I continued working in that field at my next startup, Criterion AI, where we developed visual inspection software for the pharmaceutical industry. I’ve always enjoyed working with technical co-founders, exploring what we could build together and how to turn it into a business. My co-founder, [Michael Sass Hansen](), and I eventually [sold Criterion AI to Brevetti CEA](). After a year and a half there, I started Heyhack with [Anders Skovsgaard](), building software to automate penetration testing of web applications. We [sold Heyhack to F5]() in February 2024, and I continue to drive the product forward under its new name, [F5 Distributed Cloud Web App Scanning](). ## Learning to fly Somewhere along the way, I also became quite absorbed in listening to [LiveATC](). There was something about the way pilots and air traffic controllers spoke to each other that kept me listening, and I wanted to understand all the technical terms they used. Eventually, listening wasn’t enough, and in 2021 I enrolled at [Roskilde Flying Club]() to learn to fly myself. I earned my private pilot license in September 2022 and went on to obtain my instrument rating at [Ikaros Fly]() in Roskilde in 2025. Since then, I’ve embarked on a flying adventure that’s taken me to general aviation airports across Denmark, Sweden, Germany, France, Spain, and the United States, and I hope to visit many more countries in a single-engine piston aircraft with my family in the future.