A campus pitch that became a job at VAARHAFT

Lukas started in biotechnology. He studied it at the Berliner Hochschule für Technik, then natural sciences in the information society at TU Berlin, and spent two years as a working student in pharmaceutical production at Berlin Chemie, monitoring and validating production processes.

the pitch.

In 2025 he met the team at VAARHAFT during a pitch on the 42 Berlin campus. What started as a conversation turned into a real opportunity. In March 2026 he joined them full-time as an AI and Data Engineer.

the work.

Some insurance claims arrive with photos that are AI-generated, edited or lifted from the internet. VAARHAFT's Fraud Scanner checks each claim photo, says whether it is AI-generated or edited, marks the manipulated areas, and checks whether the image came from the internet or was handed in before. Insurers including LVM, Janitos, GEV and RheinLand use it. Lukas works on the data workflows, automations and model training systems behind it.

VAARHAFT was founded in 2023. In 2025 it won the Norddeutscher Zukunftspreis für KI, the first time the jury chose a startup. On his own site, Lukas puts the job like this: "In a world where anyone can generate a fake image in seconds, I build the AI systems that tell you what's real. The truth in media shouldn't be optional."

the 42 part.

At 42 Berlin he founded the AI Club and co-organised its vibecoding hackathon. With a machine learning model for analysing manufacturing processes, he won the Data Science Meets Biology hackathon, run with Bayer. He also took part in the AI for All hackathon by Anthropic and 42 London, and a Hack The Box capture-the-flag bootcamp in Morocco with 1337 and the 42 Network.

the detours.

He wrote about the road there in From Biotech to Tech: A Non-Linear Career Path, and the line quoted on this page comes from it. It sums up a lot of 42 careers, not just his. He has also written about AI safety in fraud detection and about peer-to-peer learning in software engineering, all on his site.