Nia, an AI startup founded by 18-year-old entrepreneur Arlan Rakhmetzhanov, has closed an $850,000 (£637,000) pre-seed round.
Rakhmetzhanov taught himself coding at school in his home country of Kazakhstan, releasing small-scale software products, all the while becoming frustrated at the limits of AI tools used in programming.
Popular LLM bots like ChatGPT are often used for quick, one-off coding tasks, but are unreliable at scale. There are AI code editors, such as Windsurf, however, they are generally deployed with narrow and inflexible context windows.
Having moved to London after a stint working under a Stanford professor, Rakhmetzhanov created Nia, which he describes as an AI teammate for engineers and claims is capable of understanding 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,” Rakhmetzhanov 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.”
Users can query Nia the autonomous engineer either directly from API or from Slack or Cursor and receive support based on their coding issues.
Nia is live in beta and will use the new capital injection to scale its product ahead of a wider release.
The pre-seed funding came from Robinhood and Figma investor LocalGlobe.
“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,” said LocalGlobe partner Emma Phillips.
“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.”
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