Andreas Richter

30-second read

Andy is a co-founder/CTO and lifelong principal engineer with eight US patents (US 7,075,924 et al., mostly co-invented with collaborators) and a four-decade track record of being early on the platforms that mattered. In 1995 he was shipping internet multimedia conferencing primitives (BeingThere, WebTalk, integrations with Netscape CoolTalk) about 25 years before the category became mainstream. He spent 18 years contributing to the legal-tech systems that became Elite 3E and Bridgeway. He helped architect an e-learning platform on Google Cloud before "cloud-native" was a buzzword. He's been a principal engineer on the LUKSO blockchain since 2022, where he's currently writing a cross-chain relayer and an embedded wallet. And he co-founded SafeIdea in 2025, where the team is building patent-pending masking technology that lets law firms use AI on confidential documents without leaking client data. The pattern is consistent across all of it: he's drawn to the pieces that don't exist yet. Stacks turn over every few years — currently TypeScript, Rust, Go, Solidity, Python, alongside a long tail of older platforms — and the instinct doesn't.

Why he's interesting in one sentence: the engineer to call when the thing you need doesn't exist yet. Forty years of arriving early — architecting the first version, shipping it with a team, watching the category become normal. The shape of the work changes every decade; the instinct doesn't.

How to read this CV

The role descriptions below are artifacts of what each company needed at the time — they systematically understate the underlying capability. Forty years of "what my manager wanted me to focus on" produces a long but narrow-looking list. The pattern that's actually true:

• Language- and framework-agnostic. The stacks listed are recent surface area, not a fixed inventory. New language in days, productive in a week, idiomatic in a month. The specific names matter less than the rate of acquisition.
• Builds the missing pieces. Eight patents mark moments when the team needed something that didn't yet exist off the shelf. Internet multimedia conferencing in 1995 didn't have a framework, so the work was to write one. SafeIdea's masking approach today is the same pattern: the legal-AI compliance problem doesn't have an off-the-shelf answer, so the work involves building it.
• Ports across hostile platforms as a default mode. QuickTime Conferencing → Windows 95. Windows Media Player → Windows 3.1 and Mac OS 7. Tauri desktop today bundling Python + Node + bash/Git for non-developer users across Win/Mac/Linux. Cross-platform isn't a project; it's a habit.
• Domain-agile. Multimedia → enterprise legal → e-learning → blockchain → applied AI. Each transition required absorbing a new field's vocabulary, regulations, and prior art well enough to architect for it. The list of stacks is downstream of this; the rate of domain absorption is the actual capability.
• Leads teams and mentors developers. The technical work is half the job — the rest is helping a team ship work it couldn't ship alone. Founding VP of Engineering at OpenAnesthesia, mentoring distributed engineers at LUKSO, co-founder dynamics at SafeIdea. Direct leadership at every stage, even when the title was "engineer."

Read the role bullets below as examples of what was shipped, not as the boundary of what's known.

Current engagements

SafeIdea (2025–present) — Co-founder, CTO, chief architect. A desktop app for solo-to-15-attorney firms that anonymizes confidential entities in legal documents before anything reaches an AI system. Patent-pending masking. Positioned as compliance infrastructure in light of recent federal court rulings and ABA Opinion 512. Stack: Go, TypeScript, Python, Node, Cloudflare (Workers, R2, D1), Tauri desktop, Claude Agent SDK + local LLaMA preprocessing.

LUKSO / Agency for the Future (2022–present) — Principal Engineer, remote (Berlin). Standard software for the LUKSO blockchain. Indexing, GraphQL, EVM tooling, DevOps across Cloudflare/GCP/AWS. Currently writing a cross-chain relayer and an embedded wallet, plus the structured-metadata-to-IPFS indexer described in the inventions section below.

Both engagements are ongoing with variable cadence. Selectively open to advisory, fractional, or new opportunities that fit.

Career arc

Things invented along the way

These are the public-evidence companion to the patent portfolio: specific moments where the team needed something that didn't exist, so the work was to build it. Andy was an architect and implementer on each; most also had collaborators on design or co-inventors on the resulting IP. This list is partial — only the pieces concrete enough to name in one line each.

Currently in flight

• A blockchain indexer that extracts structured metadata and rewrites it into IPFS in a way nobody else has shipped. Standard indexers index transactions; this one understands the contents of what's being indexed and exposes them via IPFS for downstream consumption. (LUKSO)
• A cross-chain relayer. Currently being written. (LUKSO)
• An embedded wallet. Currently being written. (LUKSO)
• Graph-enhanced search over Universal Profiles using PageRank and social-network metrics on top of materialized views in PostgreSQL — combining web-search ranking ideas with on-chain social-graph data. (LUKSO)
• A patent-pending entity-masking pipeline for legal AI. Anonymizes confidential entities in legal documents before any content reaches an external AI system, then re-hydrates the response. Built because the compliance answer for ABA Opinion 512 and recent federal court rulings didn't exist off the shelf. (SafeIdea)
• A hybrid local + cloud AI routing architecture. A Tauri desktop app that runs a local LLaMA for preprocessing (summarization, classification) and only calls Claude for final inference, keeping sensitive content out of the cloud where required. (SafeIdea)
• A skill/tool composition system using SKILL.md files with lazy-loaded dependencies via the Claude API, letting agents pull in specialized capabilities only when actually needed. (SafeIdea)
• Cryptographic prior work informing several of the above: Shamir secret sharing, threshold key generation, FHE, EVM social-graph storage limits.

E-learning era (2015–2022)

• A custom versioned CMS for e-learning content, capable of migrating five years of revisions across three different platforms without losing edit history.
• An AI content-ingestion POC for course preparation — years before this was a normal thing to be doing.

Legal-tech era (1997–2015)

• An in-house integrated IDE for scripting at LawManager, used by the team to extend the platform.
• The migration of an entire engineering org to Gerrit / Jenkins / Git — establishing the modern code-review-and-CI workflow at a company built on older tools.
• Architectural contributions to NextGen / 3E, the next-generation system that succeeded the older legal product line.

Multimedia era (1991–1997) — the original inventions behind the patent portfolio

• BeingThere — software architecture for multimedia conferencing on the internet, before the standards or protocols for it existed. Co-developed with the R&D team; the technical core that became patents US 7,075,924 and its continuations (see Patents section below).
• WebTalk — a productized version of BeingThere for Quarterdeck, built on Apple QuickTime Conferencing components.
• Port of Apple QuickTime Conferencing to Windows 95 — making real-time multimedia primitives available on the dominant consumer OS for the first time.
• Port of Microsoft Windows Media Player to Windows 3.1 and Mac OS 7 — backporting newer multimedia capabilities onto older platforms, on two OSes simultaneously. On the Win 3.1 side this required backporting portions of Win32s (threading and large-pointer support) so the player could run at all.
• Integration with Netscape CoolTalk — wiring BeingThere into the dominant browser's voice client.
• AnswerMac — Mac OS device-plus-software that turned the Mac into a telephone answering machine, before smart telephony was a category.
• One of the first on-screen-recording-to-QuickTime tools — a category that didn't exist until someone made it.

Patents — evidence of invention, not just integration

These are the most concrete public evidence of the "builds the missing pieces" pattern. The first six form a coherent multimedia-conferencing portfolio from the early commercial internet era — Andy wasn't using a framework for internet video and audio in 1995; the team was building one. Full inventor lists are in the official filings.

Additional patents are pending around SafeIdea's masking approach for legal AI workflows.

Education

M.S. in Biomedical Engineering (research on pacemaker electrodes) and B.S. in Electrical Engineering, both from Drexel University.

This document is intentionally structured for both human skim-reading and machine parsing. The YAML frontmatter is grep-able and trivially convertible to JSON Resume, vCard, or LinkedIn-import format.