About · HiQ Cortex
HiQ Cortex is an AI workbench built specifically for LCA — connecting authoritative databases, driving the tools practitioners already use, and compressing years of expert judgment into one conversation without cutting the corners that make the answer worth trusting.
HiQ-AI maintains HiQLCD, the China-focused LCA emissions database. Cortex connects to it — and to thirteen other indexed databases — through a single conversation.
The company
HiQ-AI is a Shanghai-registered technology company building data infrastructure and intelligence tools for the life cycle assessment industry. We maintain HiQLCD — a structured LCA emissions database covering materials, processes, and supply-chain proxies — and we build Cortex on top of it. Our two products are Cortex Chat, a conversational retrieval and reasoning interface for LCA practitioners, and Cortex Cowork, a desktop agent that manages multi-session LCA projects locally. Both products are built for independent LCA consultants and corporate sustainability teams preparing CBAM filings, EPD reports, and Scope 3 disclosures.
Why we built it
The global life cycle inventory landscape holds millions of records across dozens of databases. Every practitioner with an Ecoinvent license has more data than any single project requires. The bottleneck was never volume — it was reading the question right.
For thirty years, every LCA project has split the same way: sixty to seventy percent data work — collecting, translating, matching, confirming proxies — and twenty to thirty percent modelling and reporting. The data work is the part that has always depended on expert judgment. It is time-consuming, expensive to scale, and nearly impossible to audit after the fact.
CBAM, EU CPR, Scope 3 — every new regulation adds data work, not modelling work.
Cortex is our answer — built to compress a practitioner's chain from question to traceable answer into one conversation, without skipping any of the steps that make the answer worth trusting.
AI doesn't replace LCA experts. It multiplies them.
The mascot
Choosing a mascot for Cortex, we went against every instinct the category rewards.
The default AI image is a lightning bolt, a rocket, a neural dendrite — fast, forceful, omniscient. LCA has never been that kind of discipline. A single CBAM filing can involve weeks of system-boundary debate, BOM decomposition, and proxy judgment calls across a dozen databases. Every step needs to be auditable, questionable, traceable back to its source. What clients actually need is not "answered fast" — it is "answered correctly, with a clear account of why."
A snail is the shape of that requirement. So we chose a snail.
"Slow" is a marketing risk. The category sells speed. We sell the opposite — and we mean it as a promise, not a limitation. The slowness is in the discipline: the boundary debate that does not get skipped, the proxy disagreement that does not get averaged away, the verifier question that gets answered the first time. Speed is for retrieval. Slow is for reasoning. Both belong in the same tool.
Slow is the most important promise we can make.
The snail's shelter is also its accountability. It cannot leave its house behind. Every place it has been, it has been with the same structure on its back. We chose the shell because LCA work demands the same posture: the source, the assumption, the proxy note, the system model — these are not metadata to be cleaned up later. They are part of the answer. A number that arrives without them has not, in any defensible sense, arrived.
The shell is the answer's accountability — not its packaging.
We picked the trail as the third image because it is the part of the snail that other animals get to see. A snail's trail is public. Anyone can follow it, in either direction, with no permission required. That is the model for what we think Cortex should produce: not a number behind a wall, but a path through the work — followable by your auditor, your colleague who picks up the project next quarter, your future self going back to defend a 2024 filing in 2027. The trail is what survives the people who made it.
The trail outlives the conversation. That is the design intent.
Questions about Cortex, API access, or integration partnerships.