Nia Rakheja she/her

Nia Rakheja is the founder and CEO of Drift Legal AI, a Berlin-based startup tackling one of Germany's most consequential bottlenecks: immigration. Drift helps applicants work with immigration lawyers and file compliant applications, cutting through delays that today force people to wait 12–18 months for appointments and overwhelm the lawyers and case workers caught in the same broken system.

The product is built from lived experience. As a newcomer founder herself, Nia is building Drift for the next person walking that path. In 2023, Nia was honored with the Berlin Newcomer Startup Award by SINGA Deutschland.

Germany needs 288,000 skilled workers a year and loses €86 billion annually to labor shortages alone. At re:publica, Nia joins Beyond Integration: How Newcomer Founders Are Reshaping Europe's Economy to argue that fixing immigration isn't a humanitarian aside, it's an economic imperative, and one founders who've lived inside the problem are uniquely positioned to solve.