About
I’m Jochen, a Belgian engineer living in Paphos, Cyprus. I build with AI agents every day, and help companies turn AI and crypto into products people actually use.
I build products people come back to. Today that’s Lurk, where I’m co-founder and CTO: an agent-first rewards engine that turns any app, community or brand into a game people love to play. Points, XP, levels and streaks live on one ledger across a brand’s site, app, game and Discord, and builders set it all up from Claude Code or Cursor.
Lurk grew out of Drip, where I was founding engineer. I built the platform, the quest engine and every integration across Discord, Telegram and the web, and we grew it to 2.1K communities and 7.1M members. Before Lurk I was also founding engineer at Onsight, a social prediction markets platform from D20 Labs (a Zynga spinout), where I built the Telegram trading bot, the app and an AI oracle that writes the markets, and lead engineer at Xeet, which used AI to score and reward good posts on X.
We build Lurk with agents across product, engineering, design and marketing, so a team of two does what used to take ten. That’s what I bring to other teams too. Through Van Camp Ventures I work with a few at a time, building AI into the business they already run, shipping new AI-native products, or using crypto where it actually fits.
I studied Computer Science at HOGENT in Ghent. I’ve done two hackathons and won both: the Infrastructure & Scaling grand prize at ETHDenver 2025 with Baseline, crypto onboarding over a phone call, and Consensus Toronto 2025 with Dead Man’s Wallet, AI-run crypto inheritance.
Outside of work you’ll find me in the gym most days, out for a run, on a padel court or at the beach. Every now and then I jump out of a plane, and Cyprus makes it easy to get away and travel when I need a reset.