An AI platform building the next generation of autonomous engineering agents and founded by an 18-year-old has raised a £637,000 pre-seed round.
Nia, which was launched by now-2x founder Arlan Rakhmetzhanov, is a product of technical ambition and deep frustration.
Having taught himself to code at high school in Kazakhstan and launching multiple products including an education platform that’s reached thousands of students, Rakhmetzhanov became increasingly frustrated by the limits of today’s AI coding tools.
After cold-calling his way into a research role under Stanford’s Ilya Strebulaev, one of the world’s leading venture capital professors, Rakhmetzhanov set out to build Nia – a new class of autonomous engineer that acts like a colleague and understands codebases as deeply as the developers who wrote them.
“Every AI coding assistant I tried forgot where things lived in my repository – spitting out files that didn’t follow my patterns, duplicating logic, or hallucinating,” he said.
“I wanted to build an AI teammate that actually remembered my project, pointed me to the right places, and let me skip the busywork; an assistant that understood my code as well as I did.
“This was the inspiration behind Nia and it’s built on a simple idea – stop fighting your tools and let them help you build.”
The pre-seed round was led by LocalGlobe, with participation from No Label Ventures, Andrena Ventures, Ventures Together, Eurasian Hub Ventures, and Artificial Societies (YC W25).
The London-headquartered startup is already live in beta and engineers can ask questions across multiple repositories at once to quickly find answers without switching context or leaving their terminal.
The funding will be used to expand its technical team, including hiring a founding engineer for backend AI infrastructure, refine its core agent capabilities and scale access to more engineering teams worldwide.
Emma Phillips, partner at LocalGlobe, added: “Arlan is one of the most driven founders we’ve met – teaching himself to code, shipping multiple products, cold-emailing his way into Stanford and building Nia entirely on his own before even turning 18.
“He’s not just building a better AI tool; he’s setting the standard for what AI teammates can be. All while laying the foundations for a business where the most ambitious developers will want to work.”