Rexhep Rexhepi was born in 1987 in Pristina, Kosovo, the son of a watchmaker who had worked in Geneva. He trained formally at the Patek Philippe school in Geneva — one of the most selective watchmaking programmes in the world — and remained with Patek for several years after graduating, working in the complications department and acquiring an unusually deep familiarity with the highest standards of Swiss movement finishing and construction. He founded AKRIVIA in Geneva in 2012 at the age of twenty-four, making him one of the youngest people ever to establish a credible independent watchmaking atelier.

AKRIVIA produces fewer than thirty watches per year, all made by Rexhepi himself with very limited assistance. His output has from the outset been characterised by a combination of technical ambition and finishing quality that is exceptional even by independent standards. The Chronomètre Contemporain, AKRIVIA's founding reference, established a design language of classical restraint and modern precision that has remained consistent across the subsequent range. Later complications — including a rattrapante chronograph and a tourbillon — have attracted significant collector attention and placed Rexhepi in the top tier of living watchmakers despite his relative youth and small output.

Rexhepi is one of very few watchmakers to have received the Aiguille d'Or at the Grand Prix d'Horlogerie de Genève before the age of forty, a recognition of both the quality of his work and the significance of what he represents: a practitioner who entered the trade through formal training rather than family heritage, and who has established himself entirely on the merit of the objects he makes. His story — from Kosovo to Patek Philippe to the highest levels of independent horology — is one of the more unusual and compelling in contemporary watchmaking.