Nicolas Dehandschoewercker is a 23 year old Imperial College London engineer, serial founder, ex-IBM and Bain&Company. His unique path began in French military school, where 6AM wake-ups and push-ups in the snow forged exceptional discipline, followed by amateur boxing that taught him to embrace competition and relentless preparation.

At 17, he moved to Japan as Waseda University's youngest international student that year, and only European (average age 20), fighting from last place to second in his class while learning Japanese. After building products at IBM and in startups, he founded and sold Fuego, an AI trip planner that pioneered social media-to-map conversion.

His experiences - from running out of funding and hacking solutions to training for fights where defeat meant physical consequences - shaped his approach to building: embrace the hardest problems, prepare obsessively, and never accept limitations as permanent. He now applies this mindset to Minitap, building AI models that are #1 in all official benchmarks, outperforming the models of Bytedance, Google Deepmind, and smaller competitors.

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