Nia Funding News- London-based Nia Secures €747K In Pre-Seed Funding Round

The round was led by LocalGlobe, with support from No Label Ventures, Andrena Ventures, Ventures Together, Eurasian Hub Ventures, and Artificial Societies (part of YC W25).

Emma Phillips, Partner at LocalGlobe, says, “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.”

Nia will use the funding to grow its technical team, including hiring a founding engineer to build its backend AI systems. The money will also help improve its core AI features and make the platform available to more engineering teams around the world.

Nia was founded by 18-year-old Arlan Rakhmetzhanov, a self-taught coder from Kazakhstan and a two-time founder.

After building several products, including an education platform, he grew frustrated with current AI coding tools. While tools like ChatGPT could handle simple tasks, they struggled with larger, more complex codebases. Others, like Cursor and Windsurf, fit into workflows but lacked deeper understanding.

Seeing that developers were spending too much time managing these tools instead of coding, Rakhmetzhanov took a research role with Stanford professor Ilya Strebulaev. He then created Nia—an AI teammate that works like a real colleague, fully understanding codebases and offering smarter, more helpful support.

Rakhmetzhanov says, “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. 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.”

Nia can create real-time models of any codebase and connect code from different projects into one shared knowledge graph.

Developers can ask Nia questions through different platforms and get fast, helpful answers that understand the context. This helps automate tasks like exploring new systems and linking code across projects, making onboarding quicker.

Nia is built to work like a teammate, helping developers get up to speed faster and find the information they need easily. It aims to support and enhance developers—not replace them.

Nia is now available in beta with features designed to help developers. Engineers can search through multiple code repositories directly from their terminal. New team members can also use the @Nia tag in Slack to get quick answers, making onboarding easier.

Nia’s MCP server helps it understand large projects better by giving more context to its AI. There's also a single API that lets teams connect Nia to their systems and build custom workflows and automations.