Lorenzo Puricelli

Founder & CEO, Optlyx · l.puricelli@optlyx.com · Italy

17 years old, and 17 years building. Founder, CEO and CTO of Optlyx. I've been writing code since I was 5 and I'm self-taught on the whole technical side; the rest (selling, negotiating, getting it wrong) I learned running businesses since I was 12.

Experience

Sep 2025, present

Founder, CEO & CTO, Optlyx

Software for accounting firms. I founded it after 200 calls with firms, and wrote nearly all of the code: Prisma, today in production at real firms, and Clerk, in private beta. Beyond product I handle direct sales, contracts, GDPR and the AI Act.

EstateIcons

A real-estate SaaS for the US market, founded by me. It crashed: no money, against funded competitors, on their home turf. The lesson I kept, that you don't fight a funded incumbent on its own ground, is why Optlyx starts in Italy and attacks nobody head-on.

first business

Website and ads for my mother's business

I fixed it. The first time code I wrote generated revenue.

age 12

Founder of an esports team

With no business model. First lesson: technology without a model to hold it up dies.

age 5

Minecraft, and my first bots to play with it

I never stopped writing code after that.

Education

Business Administration, Finance and Marketing

As a kid I wanted to be an entrepreneur, and picked my schooling accordingly.

Self-taught, largely on YouTube

The whole technical side. Programming, systems architecture, cloud, security, finance, sales: entire university courses, conference talks and brilliant people explaining their craft for free. It's current, it's on demand and it asks nobody's permission. What's missing is the order to watch things in, and I built that by getting it wrong.

What I've built

I don't have a list of technologies to put here: tools are learnable. This is what I can do.

I build an entire product alone and ship it to production. Backend, frontend, infrastructure, security. Not a prototype: software holding up real firms, with their clients' data on it.
I put AI where it belongs and keep it out of where it doesn't. The expensive model only steps in when the decision is genuinely uncertain, and it never picks freely. The rest is deterministic. When the system doesn't know, it stops and asks: where someone else's money and liability are involved, guessing is worse than stopping.
I get software in where there's no door. Italian accounting software has no public API, and I found a way to work inside it anyway.
I design knowing the data isn't mine. Real isolation between customers, and compliance (e-signature, preservation, anti-money-laundering, GDPR, the AI Act) designed in from the start rather than bolted on at the end.
I sell what I write, and I write the contracts I sell it with.

The tools, for whoever's looking: Node.js, React and TypeScript, Firestore, Google Cloud, Stripe, Gmail and Microsoft Graph, IMAP and Italian certified email.