Niklas
Britz

My name is Niklas. I am currently doing a masters at ETH Zürich, building an AI consulting & development company called LupAi, doing research, and working on various fun projects.

MSc @ ETH Zürich
AI & ML
Co-Founder
Niklas Britz
MSc CS · ETH Zürich

Who I am

Think,
and Create.

I'm a Master's student in Computer Science at ETH Zürich, specialising in AI and machine intelligence. I graduated with honors from Saarland University (top 5%) and spent an awesome year at the University of Washington.

What drives me is the intersection of technical work and creative problem-solving. I've built apps used by real people, published research, won hackathons, and taught complex topics to hundreds of students.

The best solutions are both technically elegant and intuitively simple.

Languages
PythonJava C/C++SwiftLaTeX
Domains
Machine LearningPrivacy-preserving AI CryptographyAlgorithms
Currently
ETH Zürich MScLupAiResearch

What I've built

Ventures &
projects.

Active · Sep 2025 – Present AI Startup

AI consulting & development for small and medium-sized businesses. Built RAG pipelines and LLM-driven financial document extraction systems, enabling SMBs to unlock insights from their unstructured data: bringing enterprise AI capabilities to teams that actually need them.

Financial document extraction pipeline
Financial Document Extraction
End-to-end pipeline for structured data extraction from PDFs: local ingestion, anonymization, LLM parsing with mapping rules, and consistency checks. Transmission and processing happen entirely in Switzerland.
Small and medium size focus
Liechtenstein's leading newspaper

"We were drowning in old archives. LupAi built a solution tailored to our workflow, giving journalists fast access to accurate, source-backed information they can trust."

— Daniel Bargetze, CEO
RAG Systems
Retrieval-augmented generation pipelines that connect LLMs to internal document archives with source-backed, verifiable answers.
RAG system in action
PythonRAG LLMsDocument AICo-Founder
Exited · Apr 2026 iOS App
YouKnow (exited)

A social discovery platform that transforms how people share and find places. Instead of star ratings, YouKnow lets you search by vibe. For example, you can search "a cozy spot for a first date" or "the best hidden rooftop bar." Built collaborative recommendation maps, gamified exploration with XP levels, and community-curated location data available globally.

iOS / SwiftSocial Discovery MapsRecommendation EngineGamification
YouKnow YouKnow YouKnow YouKnow YouKnow YouKnow YouKnow YouKnow
Claude Builder Club 2026 Hackathon
1st Place Claude Builder Club 2026
Zenline

Won the Claude Builder Club 2026 Hackathon in Zurich. A competitive pricing intelligence platform that automatically matches a retailer's catalog to competitor products. It replaces days of manual research with a vector search + LLM reranking pipeline.

TypeScriptNext.js PythonWeaviateClaude API
GitHub
Solace app screenshot
Hackathon Swiss AI · ETH
Solace

Built in 24h at the Swiss AI Hackathon by ETH Entrepreneur Club. A post-loss administrative companion guiding relatives through German and Swiss bureaucracy after a death: insurance claims, inheritance, AI-generated correspondence, OCR document parsing.

Next.jsFastAPI LangChainOCROpenAI
GitHub
Mitral valve segmentation
Project Computer Vision · Medical AI
Mitral Valve Segmentation

Custom U-Net implementation for automated segmentation of the mitral valve in cardiac ultrasound sequences. Trained on annotated echocardiography data, enabling accurate and efficient diagnostic workflows for cardiologists.

PythonPyTorch U-NetComputer VisionMedical Imaging
GitHub

Academic work

Research &
publications.

UTrace paper
Privacy · ML Security
UTrace: Poisoning Forensics for Private Collaborative Learning

Cryptographic protocols like MPC protect data privacy but blind-spot data poisoning. UTrace provides post-hoc auditing that attributes model integrity failures to responsible data owners — combining gradient similarity analysis with user-level unlearning, without compromising MPC privacy guarantees.

arXiv preprint
Survival analysis — RELGAM
Medical AI · Statistics
Nonparametric Survival Analysis with RELGAM

Developed regularized generalized additive models (RELGAM) for survival analysis, capturing nonlinear covariate effects in clinical data. Compared against classical methods like glmnet, achieving more expressive hazard function estimates for patient outcome prediction.

Sentiment system diagram Sentiment algorithm Sentiment results
NLP · LLMs
Sentiment Analysis via Learned Prompting

Built a learned prompting framework for sentiment classification using LLMs, combining a neural prompt selector (DistilRoBERTa) with a greedy prompt optimizer. Outperforms standard prompting strategies on accuracy, F1, and NMAE across sentiment benchmarks.

GitHub
Bachelor thesis cover Bachelor thesis content Bachelor thesis content
Cryptography · Theory
Gaussian Linear Secret Sharing

Two threshold secret sharing schemes over infinite algebraic structures — continuous linear sharing over ℝ and approximate linear sharing over ℤ — motivated by RSA distributed exponentiation. Secrets are hidden under Gaussian distributed shares, with security and reconstruction analyzed rigorously. Saarland University, March 2024.


Let's connect

Say hello.

Whether you want to talk about AI, build something together, or just grab a coffee. I'm always happy to connect with curious people.