The People
Two grammars, two people who spent their lives learning them.
Who we are
Reality Crisis is built by two people who each spent decades learning a different grammar, one of story and one of movement, and then set out to teach both to machines.
Kasimir Lehto
Co-founder, CEO and creative lead
Kasimir grew up in a filmmaking family and left home a pro snowboarder at seventeen, filming on 8mm the whole way. Three decades later, the throughline hasn't changed: learn how stories work, then build the systems that let them work at scale.
A decade as DP and director, features and hundreds of commercials across Europe. A stereoscopic-3D bet in 2006 led to supervising 3D for Hollywood studios, including Fox, Sony and Universal. Perception research with the University of Helsinki, Waseda University and Nokia Research Center, studying how presence actually works. XR work for civilian astronaut training, with NASA collaboration.
In 2018, he founded Reality Crisis: the place where story, perception, space and play become one system.
Rodney Mullen
Co-founder, investor
Rodney Mullen, co-founder and investor, first landed many of the tricks street skaters still do every day. The names skaters gave those tricks became a shared language, and that language is where this company started.
The team
A senior crew working between Helsinki, Mexico City and the US: people who've shipped games, trained models, built XR and film pipelines, and skated the spots this company was founded on. Everyone here touches the thing that ships.
- Heba Rinkinen, Principal AI Engineer, leads brAIn. He brings 20+ years in digital media production and AI development, from generative AI and LLM integration to custom tools that fit both code and video workflows.
- Igor Dmytrus, Development Director, works where sensing the physical world meets real-time rendering and AI: spatial computing, XR, agentic workflows and the systems architecture behind the networked physics of the award-winning Skatrix.
- Sami Syrjä, Lead UI/UX and experience designer, shapes how brAIn and Skatrix look, feel and behave, from the brand to the screens a filmmaker works in every day.
- Leo Lagno, 3D artist, animator and engineer, grounds motion in real physics: rendering, optimisation and the skateboarding knowledge behind every trick the AI skaters land.
The advisors
People who've built at the scale we're heading toward.
- Bill Higgins, VP, AI for Developers at IBM and Chair of IBM's Open Innovation Community, with more than two decades working across AI platforms, developer tools and open innovation.
- Steve Francia, creator of Hugo and Cobra, and former engineering, product and open-source leader at Google, Docker and MongoDB.
- Cyril Barrow, former Group General Manager at Electronic Arts, with senior studio and operations roles at Rovio, Gameloft and Digital Chocolate.
We all rise together
Skateboarding taught this company its working culture. We'd rather invent than imitate, we care about craft more than polish, and we want individual expression to thrive inside mutual encouragement.
Think you belong here?