Nikolai Raitschew

Nikolai Raitschew (18) is founder and Managing Director of anymize, the data-protection-compliant AI platform for professionals bound by confidentiality obligations. In an industry where most founders look back on a completed degree and years of professional experience, his path is a different one: he founded his company at the age of 17, was still at school at the time, and remains so to this day.

Career

Nikolai came to programming through his father, Raitschin Raitschew, an entrepreneur through and through. At the age of eleven he wrote his first lines of code, inspired by him. What began as a hobby became a shared language between father and son. In the years that followed, Nikolai taught himself further, learning how software is built, how systems interact, and how to solve problems for which no solution yet exists.

The decisive turning point came during an internship. There he saw up close what happens daily in sensitive professions: lawyers, tax advisers and doctors know exactly how much work a language model could take off their hands, summarising documents, comparing contracts, extracting deadlines from files. And yet they do not touch it, because every document contains names, addresses and file references that they are not permitted to disclose. The question Nikolai took away with him was simple: why are the people who need support most urgently not allowed to use modern AI?

The answer seemed obvious: if the problem is that sensitive data reaches the language model, then it must not be allowed to reach it. A protective layer that anonymises data before a model sees it, and reinserts the real information afterwards. As obvious as the idea was, it simply did not exist. Many would have commissioned a development studio. Nikolai and his father built it themselves, together.

Current role

As the technical mind behind anymize, Nikolai has developed large parts of the platform himself. The technology detects personal information such as names, IBANs, dates of birth or file references in documents and replaces them with placeholders before the text is sent to models such as ChatGPT, Claude or Gemini. In the response, the real information is reinserted, visible only to the user. The model has never seen it. Raitschin Raitschew, as an experienced entrepreneur, provides the operational foundation and keeps the young team's back free. Today, over 1,000 paying customers rely on anymize, ranging from law firms and tax consultancies to municipal administrations and medium-sized enterprises; more than 240 lawyers accompanied the development during the beta phase. The main customer base is in the legal sector.

Topics and focus areas

Nikolai's work revolves around anonymisation technology, data protection architecture, and the practical question of how AI can be used in regulated professions without sensitive data leaving the premises. His guiding principle: data protection is not an obstacle, but the precondition for AI to have the greatest impact where it matters most.

Engagements and awards

Nikolai regularly appears as a speaker and pitcher, representing anymize at conferences and competitions. In September 2026, anymize took second place in the start-up competition Überflieger, qualifying for a trip to Silicon Valley. Two weeks later came second place in the Digitalisation Award of the State of Schleswig-Holstein, worth 15,000 euros. anymize is based in Kiel, is a member of Legal Tech Deutschland and the Bundesverband IT-Mittelstand (BITMi), and engages with practitioners through webinars and its own stand, including at the KI-Landeskonferenz.

Conclusion

A son who builds the product, and a father who gave him the trust to do so: this constellation still shapes anymize today, close to the product, down-to-earth, North German. Nikolai shows that age is no prerequisite for responsibility, as long as the problem is clear enough.