Biography
Jonas Helwig is a founder, CEO, entrepreneur and strategic advisor whose work sits where energy systems, software and long-term infrastructure meet. He is co-founder of Kistora, an AI security company, and co-founder of Nuclearis Energy.
Over more than twenty years he has worked across energy markets, business development, venture creation and execution in sectors where technical complexity and commercial reality have to meet. The current work is concentrated in four places: energy storage, including grid-scale batteries and sand-based thermal storage; energy trading across day-ahead, intraday and balancing markets; grid balancing and the design of power systems that stay robust as generation becomes more weather-dependent; and AI systems built into the operational core of energy businesses, from CRM and telephony to dispatch.
He also writes: essays on power and computation, and a novel based on real events.
He writes and speaks about electricity systems, storage, energy density, AI-driven compute demand, infrastructure bottlenecks, and the relationship between power policy and economic power. His perspective on AI is grounded in execution rather than commentary: workflows, systems, product loops, and the physical constraints sitting beneath the software narratives.
This website is the canonical home for his writing, media references, projects, publications, podcast activity and long-form thinking.
Kistora: AI Security and Agent Governance
Jonas Helwig is co-founder of Kistora, a company built around a specific shift: AI agents have moved from producing answers to taking actions. Once an agent can touch production systems, code, credentials and workflows, the interesting question is no longer what it can generate but what it is permitted to do.
Kistora sits in front of that moment. It intercepts an agent's action before execution, evaluates it against policy, and decides whether to allow it, block it, or escalate it to a human, leaving behind a tamper-evident receipt for every decision, recorded in a signed, hash-chained ledger. The platform spans secret-boundary protection, credential use without possession, deterministic verification, workflow control, policy receipts and encrypted storage. The underlying principle is short: hold the proof, not the secret.
Energy Work
The energy side of the work is currently concentrated in storage, trading and balancing. Storage covers both grid-scale batteries and sand batteries, which store energy as heat in a cheap and abundant medium and give back a slower, longer-duration kind of flexibility than lithium does. Trading covers day-ahead, intraday and balancing markets, and the systems that price, hedge and settle electricity in them.
Balancing ties the two together. As more generation becomes weather-dependent, matching supply and demand second by second becomes as much a software problem as a physical one. Forecasting handles the uncertainty, storage and flexibility absorb the deviations, and firm capacity covers the long windless stretches. Related problems, different jobs. Alongside that runs a nuclear thread through Nuclearis Energy, where the argument for advanced nuclear and microreactors is the same argument for firm power: electricity that is there regardless of weather.
Writing and the Novel
Jonas Helwig is also an author. Alongside the essays published here, he is writing a novel based on real events surrounding the Aum Shinrikyo cult and the 1995 Tokyo subway attack, currently in research and draft. Writing runs alongside the technical work rather than against it.
Software and Open Source
He still writes code. GOPBX replaces everything above FreeSWITCH: the control plane reimplemented in Go, with a SvelteKit and shadcn-svelte admin in place of the PHP interface. FreeSWITCH itself is left alone, which is the whole reason the project was finishable. It is open source under MIT, and it sits alongside the rest of the projects on GitHub.
Areas of Expertise
Leadership & Commercial
- CEO and executive leadership
- Entrepreneurship and venture building
- Sales leadership and enterprise sales
- Commercialisation and go-to-market
- Fundraising and investor relations
- Strategic growth and market positioning
- Regulated sectors and stakeholder navigation
- Team building and technical hiring
Energy
- Battery storage and sand-based thermal storage
- Energy trading: day-ahead, intraday and balancing
- Nordic power markets and portfolio hedging
- Balance responsibility and settlement
- Grid balancing and robust power-system design
- EV charging balancing and flexibility
- Nuclear energy, advanced reactors, microreactors
- Energy security and firm power
Engineering
- Full-stack development, frontend and backend
- Rust in production services and concurrency-heavy paths
- Go, including real-time and concurrent systems
- TypeScript, Node.js, Svelte and SvelteKit, React
- Python for data work and quantitative research
- PostgreSQL, schema design and query performance
- Distributed systems and event-driven architecture
- Linux systems administration and infrastructure
- VoIP and telephony: FreeSWITCH, SIP, WebRTC
- Web performance and frontend optimisation
AI & Data
- AI systems for CRM, operations and telephony
- AI security and agent governance
- Machine learning for forecasting and optimisation
- AI hardware and compute infrastructure
- AI infrastructure and compute demand
- Quantitative modelling and risk management
- Time-series data and anomaly detection
Founder Philosophy
I optimise for things that still work in twenty years: grids that hold, industrial capacity that stays in the country, software people open every morning without thinking about it. That bias shows up in what I build and in what I refuse to build. Marketing ages badly. Working infrastructure does not.
"When someone tells you that something can't be done, they're merely exposing their own limitations, not yours. As long as it doesn't violate the fundamental laws of physics, there's nothing you can't do."
Jonas Helwig
Extended Background
Beyond business and technology, Jonas Helwig's story includes a competitive hockey background spanning Djurgarden, Brinken IF, Lidingo Islanders, Visby Roma, Sundbyberg, and hockey in Odessa. He also has a creative side rooted in music production alongside the late Israeli artist Roen Dahan, as part of the Pura Vida duo, with touring across Brazil, Colombia, Mexico, and Argentina.
His personal history includes a tryout with FC Barcelona, a public rescue story covered in Swedish media, direct experience of the war in Ukraine from Odessa, and organising support fundraising efforts including generators and connectivity equipment for people in need.