joining andera

by adi & matthew • july 20, 2026

since the start of 2026, i’ve been the most compliant version of myself while riding a rocketship. today, we’re announcing andera’s $37m series a led by lightspeed, with participation from bain capital ventures, a*, and pear.

matthew and i joined andera as engineers #1 and #2 at the start of this year, at 18 and 19 respectively. matthew had just finished his first semester studying computer science at berkeley, and i had finished the fall semester of my sophomore year studying software engineering at waterloo.

in january, we worked from three desks cramped inside aryo’s room. today, nearly fifteen of us work together in person.

somewhere in between, matthew and i became significantly better engineers.

how we got here

i first met aryo last summer while building a company out of the pear studio in san francisco. my first thought was that he was the most humble ex-jane street i had ever met.

i had done literally zero work on agents. he still spent time helping me think through what we were building, where our technical approach was weak, and what i should learn next.

after we pivoted, a friend from new york separately introduced me to tinah. i had now met both founders through entirely different paths and still did not seriously consider joining them.

aryo asked me about working together near the end of the summer. i brushed it off and went to shopify.

he continued helping me anyway.

while i interviewed and figured out what i wanted to do next, i regularly called him for advice. he would ask questions, point out where my reasoning was weak, and help me evaluate teams and opportunities more clearly.

after a disappointing work trial elsewhere, i started thinking much more carefully about the people i wanted to learn from. i reached back out and asked aryo whether we could reopen the process.

halfway through our first technical interview, he had to leave for a client call. we delayed finishing it for almost two weeks.

when we resumed, aryo immediately noticed a change in how i approached the problem. i was more confident, interpreted the problem more clearly, and explored solutions with more structure.

i had not noticed the difference myself. he had paid enough attention during half of one interview to see it.

i completed the work trial during finals and joined shortly afterward.

matthew’s path was much faster.

he was bored at berkeley, found aryo and tinah through a recruiter, and liked how they thought during the interview process. the work trial gave him real ownership over the product and showed him the pace at which the team operated.

he joined after one semester.

my path involved a startup, two introductions, several months of advice, a client call in the middle of my interview, and a work trial during finals.

we ended up making the same decision.

the bet

aryo and tinah hired us for the engineers they believed we could become.

i had only started coding seriously during the previous year. i knew how to move quickly and figure things out, though i had limited experience building production systems with strong documentation and engineering practices.

matthew had been coding since high school and had done an internship, though, he was still 18 and early in understanding the kind of engineer he wanted to become.

within our first few months, we were designing and implementing key parts of the product.

aryo and tinah gave us enough ownership to make meaningful decisions and enough attention to stop us from getting away with shallow ones.

they ask why we reached a conclusion, which evidence supports it, and what we have failed to consider. they notice when the code works but the reasoning is weak. they care about the clarity of a message, the quality of the documentation, and whether we actually understand the data we are looking at.

i saw the same attention in how they hired.

before joining, i sent them several engineers i thought were strong. they passed on almost everyone. they also worked through hundreds of applications from waterloo (~750 applicants, 0 offers) without relaxing their standards to grow the team faster.

over time, i understood what they were looking for. every hire needed to make the people around them better. technical ability mattered, alongside curiosity, communication, and the ability to learn quickly when the answer was unclear.

watching them reject people i had referred somehow made me want to work with them more.

working with aryo and tinah

aryo and tinah are two of the smartest and most well-read people i have met. they are also warm, genuine, and deeply invested in the people around them.

they give constant feedback and make time to explain how they are thinking. they share lessons from mit, jane street, stripe, and the companies they worked on before andera. they ask about our families, school, long-term goals, and the things we want to become good at.

most importantly, they trust us with real work.

that trust has forced us to improve quickly, because other engineers have to understand what we build, customers eventually encounter our assumptions, weak documentation becomes someone else’s problem, and unclear thinking shows up in the product.

the feedback loop is immediate.

over the past few months, i have become more thorough in how i make decisions, clearer in how i communicate, and much more attentive to data. i now spend more time understanding a problem before choosing a direction. i think more carefully about how another engineer will use and change what i build.

i still have a lot to learn. i just find out what those things are much faster here.

matthew and i both hope to build generational companies one day. right now, we get to watch one being built from close enough to contribute to it.

in january, there were three desks in aryo’s room. today, we are announcing a $37m series a and working alongside a team that keeps getting better.

we are hiring engineers who want to help us build what comes next.

come ride the rocketship :)