Andreas Richter

30-second read

Andy is a co-founder/CTO and lifelong principal engineer with eight granted patents 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 building the legal-tech systems that became Elite 3E and Bridgeway. He architected 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 he's 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.

Why he's interesting in one sentence: he's the engineer you hire when you need someone who has already shipped the hard version of what you're trying to build, on platforms that didn't exist yet at the time.

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.
• Invents when existing tools don't fit. Eight patents are not a side hustle; they're what happens when the work requires something that doesn't exist yet. 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 inventing 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.

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 work needed something that didn't exist, so the answer was to build it. 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 — a software architecture for multimedia conferencing on the internet, before the standards or protocols for it existed. The technical core that became the patents.
• 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.
• 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 listed not as a credential block but as the most concrete public evidence of the "invents when existing tools don't fit" 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; he was inventing one.

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

An incomplete list of other projects

A forty-year career generates more work than fits in a CV. The list below is partial — it's the kind of detail the chat at richtera.org can surface when asked, kept here for completeness and for anyone reading the document directly. The grouping is by domain, which gives a clearer sense of breadth than chronology would.

Medical devices

• Software for a military hypobaric chamber.
• Software for ETO (ethylene oxide) sterilizers.

Aerospace and pilot training

• Software for a flight pilot disorientation trainer.
• Software for a flight pilot G-trainer — the work behind US Patent 5,051,094 (G-Lab).

Consumer hardware and embedded

• Debugging and firmware fixes on a Sony MP3 player.
• A cross-platform audio book player shipped on Android, iOS, macOS, Windows, and Windows CE.

Multimedia infrastructure (QuickTime era)

• Integration of LH and a Motorola video codec into QuickTime on Mac OS 7.
• Architectural contribution to a QuickTime streaming solution.

CAD and engineering tools

• Debugged and fixed a commercial CAD package.

Interactive media and events

• Software for interactive books.
• Software for a royal wedding slideshow.

Education

M.S. and B.S. in Electrical Engineering, 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.