Founder · CTO · System Architect
Building beautiful systems
structurally
Automations, truth, and the quiet discipline of making complex things work simply.
What I Do
I build and scale systems from zero to one. The kind of work where nothing exists yet — no architecture, no pipelines, no team structure — and something robust needs to emerge. I enjoy that space. The ambiguity, the decisions that compound, the need to move fast without creating debt you can't repay.
My strengths sit at the intersection of technology, architecture, automation, and operations. I think in systems — how data flows, where bottlenecks hide, what breaks at scale, and how to design things so they don't.
I'm less interested in selling a vision and more interested in making one work. The craft is in the structure, not the pitch.
How I'm Most Useful
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When given freedom and trust to operate, not just execute a spec.
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In early-stage or complex systems where the path forward isn't obvious yet.
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Where ownership matters — I take responsibility for outcomes, not just outputs.
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With teams that value clarity, directness, and doing the right thing over the easy thing.
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When the problem needs both technical depth and operational awareness.
Experiences That Shaped How I Think
Not a CV. Just the things that left a mark.
China 你好 2014
What began as a naive internship became the first big pivot away from a 'normal life.' Over twelve months, I met the person who would become my lifelong mentor—someone who introduced me to the real working world. I worked on ERP systems, which gave me exposure to virtually everything: finance, planning, sales, warehousing, engineering, assembly, and purchasing. Building reports and expanding functionalities that had gone unused taught me how systems actually run beneath the surface. More than anything, it taught me how to interact deeply with a different culture. And perhaps the most memorable moment came near the end: a colleague I'd grown close to admitted honestly that when I first arrived, they had suspected I was sent to spy on them—a Western worker in their midst. A humbling and fascinating perspective that has stayed with me ever since.
Gaming & Performance Engineering ~2015
It started with a childhood dream: to actually develop a game. That dream led me to study Computer Games Engineering in Newcastle upon Tyne, UK. From there, competitive gaming and game engine work taught me that performance isn't an optimization—it's a design constraint. When you're working in milliseconds, every abstraction has a cost. Every allocation matters. I went deep into shader programming on LEGO Star Wars: The Force Awakens, and I'm credited on AAA titles including LEGO Worlds, LEGO City: Undercover, and LEGO Dimensions. This mindset carries into everything I build: respect the machine, measure before you assume, and understand that perceived performance is the real performance.
Cryptocurrencies ~2016
My start was probably like many: investing in a coin that never got listed—though in the hopes it would. From there, I read deeply into the technical side and became fascinated. Not just by the technology, but by its impact on society. How money actually works, what the value of currencies really means—or the hope thereof. I dove into Ethereum and smart contracts, and for me the beauty of smart contracts is undeniable. But the clash with reality and the need to customize everything makes them incredibly difficult to implement. For now, I'm a Bitcoin maximalist. And yes, I still have bitcoins.
Retraced 2017–2026
Building Retraced from scratch was the first time I truly felt what it means to have great partners. When my co-founders put their own money down to found the company, that commitment changed everything. They came from selling huaraches sourced from Mexico into Germany — they knew supply chains firsthand, not from textbooks. They wanted to capture the market, but quickly realized that real impact required connecting directly to consumers. That's how the idea of a digital product passport was born. By 2018, we were the first solution in fashion and textile to offer one. Then came the VC game — raising a total of roughly €22.5M over the years to scale the vision. As co-founder & CTO, I carried the technical direction, but being a co-founder means you naturally tap into everything — operations, finance, strategy. It was a great playing field to explore areas far beyond engineering. I grew the dev team from just me to 30 engineers, and watched it contract back to 16. The ups and downs of building something real. When AI emerged, it became a pivotal moment — not just for the product, but for me personally. It opened a door I couldn't ignore, and ultimately led me to depart from the venture. I needed to find what really matters in life.
Pakistan & Cotton Supply Chains 2021
To scale Retraced, I traveled to remote regions of Rahim Yar Khan in Pakistan, visiting cotton farms firsthand. What I found profoundly reshaped how I think about digitalization. Not everything can simply have a digital twin. The real world is layered with political and personal constraints that no dashboard captures. Farmers were selling spot cotton bales to ginners—not because of market logic, but because those ginners had provided them seeds after a devastating flood season. These dependencies aren't bugs in the system; they are the system. It taught me that building the perfect algorithm for fair redistribution or transparent payment isn't something you solve from a desk. You have to investigate on the ground, understand the relationships, and respect the complexity before you can even begin to model it.
Vipassana Retreat 2026
Vipassana revealed what I can only call a personal singularity—a point where so much of what life had given me converged into one overwhelming clarity. I discovered how deeply addicted I am not to any single craving, but to the constant need for something more, something else, every second of every day. In a foggy mind, there are really only two states: craving—wanting what you don't have—and aversion—not wanting what you have. Ten hours of meditation each day for ten days was the most painful experience I've been through. But that suffering closed the loop. Goenka's teaching landed with full force: everything is temporary. Every sensation, every thought, every desire rises and passes away. And if everything is temporary, there is no point in clinging to cravings or resisting aversions. The only sane response is equanimity.
Living Across Cultures Ongoing
Living across the UK, Cyprus, Germany, Denmark, and China—and marrying a Greek woman—taught me something I didn't expect: how deeply language is woven into culture. Our children grow up speaking Danish, German, Greek, and English, and watching them navigate those worlds has shown me that each language carries something untranslatable. I love AI and what modern translation can do, but there's a kind of magic in actually learning and speaking a language—a closeness to meaning and to people that no tool quite replaces. It's made me more humble about what I think I understand, and more curious about what I'm still missing.
Speaking & Sharing
Over the years I have given countless presentations, joined panels, recorded podcasts and vodcasts — especially during my time building Retraced. Here are some that stood out.
Retraced Accelerates Supplier Management with Oracle Database 26ai
Video with Oracle on why early architectural decisions matter — and what Oracle Database 26ai makes possible when you get them right.
Retraced Accelerates Supplier Management with Oracle Database 26ai
Video with Oracle on why early architectural decisions matter — and what Oracle Database 26ai makes possible when you get them right.
Video produced with Oracle, published on their official YouTube channel. I wanted to share why early architectural decisions compound — and why I chose to build on Oracle Autonomous Database 26ai. The video walks through what 26ai offers: AI Vector Search, Select AI for natural language querying, and a converged architecture that handles JSON, SQL, spatial, and graph in one place. At Retraced we serve over 25,000 suppliers globally. The autoscaling and multimodal capabilities of 26ai let us move fast without accumulating the kind of technical debt that slows you down later. For me, this video is about one thing: the importance of choosing the right foundation before you start building on top of it.
Oracle AI World: Sharing Our Agentic AI Approach
On stage with Hasan Rizvi at Oracle AI World in Las Vegas — sharing Retraced's agentic AI approach built on the Oracle AI Database.
Oracle AI World: Sharing Our Agentic AI Approach
On stage with Hasan Rizvi at Oracle AI World in Las Vegas — sharing Retraced's agentic AI approach built on the Oracle AI Database.
On stage with Hasan Rizvi at Oracle AI World in Las Vegas. About 8 minutes of stage time, roughly 4:30 of talk — my first keynote. I covered Oracle Database autoscaling, Oracle MCP, Vector Search, and Select AI, sharing how we at Retraced are building an agentic AI approach directly on the Oracle AI Database. I had goosebumps. I'll admit I even cried afterwards — not from stress, but from realizing how far I've come and how much it meant. I genuinely enjoyed sharing my experience so that others can benefit and make better decisions.
AI-First Supplier Lifecycle Management
Video with Oracle on rethinking supplier lifecycle management with an AI-first approach — from onboarding to continuous monitoring.
AI-First Supplier Lifecycle Management
Video with Oracle on rethinking supplier lifecycle management with an AI-first approach — from onboarding to continuous monitoring.
Video produced with Oracle, published on their official YouTube channel. This one is about what it means to take an AI-first approach to supplier lifecycle management. At Retraced, we manage the full lifecycle — onboarding, risk assessment, auditing, continuous monitoring — for over 25,000 suppliers. The video walks through how we rethought each stage with AI at the center rather than bolted on afterwards. That distinction matters more than people think. When AI is an afterthought, you end up with disconnected models and fragmented data. When it's foundational, everything from data collection to decision-making becomes more coherent. This is the approach I believe in: build the intelligence into the architecture from day one.
Does AI Catapult Us Into the Future?
Panel exchange at the Rotary MINT-Forum, Handwerkskammer Düsseldorf — streamed to 100+ participants.
Does AI Catapult Us Into the Future?
Panel exchange at the Rotary MINT-Forum, Handwerkskammer Düsseldorf — streamed to 100+ participants.
Panel exchange at the Rotary MINT-Forum in the Handwerkskammer Düsseldorf, streamed to over 100 participants. The topic: does AI catapult us into the future? I exchanged with panelists from journalism (Handelsblatt), AI research (Alexander-von-Humboldt Professor), SAP, and applied AI in craftsmanship — all looking at the same shift from very different angles. What struck me was how grounded and practical the conversations were. No theatre. People from completely different worlds trying to understand where technology can actually serve society. It pushed me out of my bubble — hearing how AI actually lands in banks, traditional industries, and consultancies gave me a level of insight I rarely get. Strong communities accelerate clarity.
Building (and Failing) an Internal AI Copilot
Talk at Pandora x Publicis Sapient Engineering Summit in Copenhagen — 200-300 listeners, ~40 on site.
Building (and Failing) an Internal AI Copilot
Talk at Pandora x Publicis Sapient Engineering Summit in Copenhagen — 200-300 listeners, ~40 on site.
Talk at the Pandora x Publicis Sapient Engineering Summit in Copenhagen, themed 'Engineering Tomorrow: Crafting and Designing the Future of Work.' About 200-300 people listening in, around 40 on site. I shared how I built an internal AI copilot at Retraced — one that extended users' capabilities to draw real conclusions from data. And I shared how I failed. Figuring out what it means to capture context and return the right answer was brutally hard. It took three iterations before we got positive reviews. On top of that, I could only publish internally. Externally would have required extended engineering around scoping and access control — in Oracle these are called Virtual Private Databases, where the database itself extends queries with filters based on session context at execution time. Honest talk about what worked, what didn't, and why shipping AI internally is already hard enough.
Oracle Global Leaders: Database MCP Server
Session on the Oracle Global Leaders call — introducing the MCP Server for Oracle Database.
Oracle Global Leaders: Database MCP Server
Session on the Oracle Global Leaders call — introducing the MCP Server for Oracle Database.
On the Oracle Global Leaders call, we explored the Oracle AI Database MCP Server — now natively part of the VS Code extension for Oracle Database. For me as a CTO who still works directly with the database, this is a massive boost. No more bouncing between prompts and manual calls — the MCP figures it out on the fly, which is incredibly helpful when playing around with raw data and analytics. Mehrad showed how easy it is to generate true full-stack apps with GitHub Copilot and Oracle MCP — front-end, back-end, and database analytics tied together. It speeds up development massively.
Safe AI Practices & Preparing for AI Code Generation
Talk at the Engineering Leadership Meetup in Copenhagen — sharing how Retraced pathed the way using safe AI practices.
Safe AI Practices & Preparing for AI Code Generation
Talk at the Engineering Leadership Meetup in Copenhagen — sharing how Retraced pathed the way using safe AI practices.
I shared how we at Retraced started with safe AI practices — tackling unstructured data like low-quality photos of handwritten warehouse records across any language — and how that foundation eased our way through a strong legal and tech due diligence when raising a €15M funding round. The talk was really about how to even start as a company with AI, and then as an outlook, how to ensure it stays safe. We also dove into our journey toward autonomous code generation, with a focus on structured development, code efficiency, and shifting testing earlier. Amazing crowd, very smart people, fantastic conversations.
Oracle 23ai, Vector DB and Select AI ... what for?
Remote session with ~100 listeners — real-world experience with Oracle Database 23ai's Vector Search and Select AI features.
Oracle 23ai, Vector DB and Select AI ... what for?
Remote session with ~100 listeners — real-world experience with Oracle Database 23ai's Vector Search and Select AI features.
Joined David O'Donnell in a remote session for about 100 listeners to share how we at Retraced leverage Vector Search and Select AI — two AI features built directly into Oracle Database 23ai. We walked through real use cases: how vector embeddings power our supplier matching and how Select AI lets us query data in natural language. For me, the key message was that these capabilities aren't add-ons — they're native to the database, which changes how you architect from the start.
Retraced Builds Its Traceability Platform on Oracle Cloud
Webinar on why we chose Oracle Autonomous Database — covering scalability, blockchain tables, and the ROI of getting foundational tech decisions right.
Retraced Builds Its Traceability Platform on Oracle Cloud
Webinar on why we chose Oracle Autonomous Database — covering scalability, blockchain tables, and the ROI of getting foundational tech decisions right.
Webinar about why we built Retraced on Oracle Autonomous Database — chosen for 24/7 global scalability, high availability, and seamless disaster recovery. We pushed boundaries by integrating JSON, SQL, and geojson within a single table and pioneering blockchain tables. The autonomous flavor of the Oracle Database enhanced our developer workflows with Docker-based local development and CI. The ROI story starts from day one: scaling efficiently and cost-effectively, a journey recognized by leading brands like S.Oliver Group and Desigual.
Retraced Runs Blockchain Platform on OCI
Architecture walkthrough with Oracle Distinguished Cloud Architect Mans Bhuller — how Retraced runs its blockchain platform on OCI.
Retraced Runs Blockchain Platform on OCI
Architecture walkthrough with Oracle Distinguished Cloud Architect Mans Bhuller — how Retraced runs its blockchain platform on OCI.
Architecture walkthrough produced with Oracle Distinguished Cloud Architect Mans Bhuller. We walk through how Retraced runs on OCI: Managed Kubernetes distributing traffic across Node.js pods, Oracle Autonomous Transaction Processing for persistent storage accessed via Service Gateway, and Hyperledger Fabric on Oracle Blockchain Platform for certificate verification — with certification authorities running their own nodes. The Autonomous Data Warehouse synchronizes blockchain data for easy querying via PL/SQL.
Craft: Baking
Baking is a personal hobby — purely for the joy of it. I don't take money for it, and at the moment I don't plan to. There's something deeply satisfying about watching ingredients come together, blend, and shape into a result. I really love the result — but understanding the process, crafting it deliberately, makes the satisfaction of eating even higher.
I'm drawn to baking specifically because it demands precision. Ratios matter. Timing matters. Small deviations lead to noticeably different outcomes. And contrary to what people often assume — yes, I can also cook. I just prefer to bake.
I try to source organic ingredients wherever I can. Not because I believe it tastes better — but because sustainability matters. It's a small contribution to our planet, but it's what I can do.
What I See Next
Directions I'm thinking about. Not predictions — interests.