Investing Before the Idea

Most VCs claim to invest in people rather than ideas. It’s an easy claim to make, because it’s almost never tested. By the time most investors show up, there’s already an idea, a market and perhaps some traction, so you can’t tell which one they actually underwrote. Every so often, though, you get a clean experiment.

In April 2024, we invested in Aryo Patel when there was nothing else to invest in. He had no cofounder and no product, and the idea he did have was one he’d later throw away.

Today, the company he ended up building, Andera (PearX S24), just raised a $37 million Series A led by Lightspeed.

So what were we looking at, if not an idea? Three things, roughly.

He Was Opinionated

Aryo is strongly opinionated. When you ask him a question, you get a position, the reasoning behind it, and (this is the rare part) what evidence would change his mind.

When we invested, the company was called RegCheck. The idea was software to help compliance officers at banks keep up with regulatory changes. Not a bad idea. In June 2024, two days before Camp Pear, he emailed me. He’d already interviewed compliance officers at banks and confirmed it was painful, but he was hitting a wall: he couldn’t get meetings with the people who could actually say yes. It turned out the pain was real, but not nearly acute enough.

So he killed his own idea. Most people, having raised money on an idea, will defend it long past the point where they believe it. Aryo treated his conviction like a hypothesis and ruthlessly discarded it as soon as he found strong evidence to counter it. That trait of strong opinions, loosely held, has stayed consistent.

He Was Tenacious

After killing RegCheck, he went back to the drawing board with a hypothesis around SOX Compliance, the testing of financial controls that every U.S. public company has had to do since Enron. He knew very little about it.

Our usual advice in situations like this is to get close to the problem through thoughtful customer discovery. Most founders treat booking discovery calls as a careful, relationship-driven process and schedule a handful each week.

Aryo used brute force.

He mapped out the people at Fortune 500 companies who actually interacted with SOX, then started sending 4,000 cold emails a week. He quickly got to 250 high-quality discovery calls with CFOs and VPs of Finance.

Picture that for a second. An MIT dropout with no product and no recognizable logo was booking meetings at some of the biggest companies in the world through sheer volume, nerve and a blatant disregard for priors.

He Was Smart and Deliberate

Aryo is smart. The kind of smart that shows up as clarity and precision of thought, rather than sounding smart by using jargon.

He applied this same analytical rigor to the most critical, irreversible decision a founder makes: choosing a partner. Everyone tells founders to choose cofounders carefully; almost nobody does. Aryo met a dozen candidates that spring (our talent team kept the introductions coming) before circling back to Tinah Hong, a friend since grade school who’d been with him at MIT and since gone on to Stripe, Microsoft, and Coframe. He was slow and thoughtful on the irreversible decisions, and fast on everything else.

None of these traits is rare on its own. The combination is, because the traits reinforce each other: opinions create speed and direction, tenacity keeps those opinions honest, and clarity helps you course-correct quickly. A founder with all three doesn’t stay lost for long.

Andera

Selling AI to Fortune 100 auditors requires an obsession with precision to ensure the software is right and relentless tenacity to survive the enterprise sales cycle. The traits Aryo showed on day one are the exact reasons he’s winning this market today.

Audit work survived software for decades because it requires judgment applied to messy, unstructured evidence. Now that constraint is starting to lift. Aryo and Tinah describe it as bringing what coding agents did for software to auditors. Andera’s software reads the evidence, runs the control tests, and writes the workpapers, today, for Fortune 100 companies, some of the most conservative buyers in software. Andera has won buyers like that slowly, by prioritizing trust and reliability over everything else.

We invested in Aryo at pre-seed before an idea, again at seed with a validated idea (and Tinah!), and we’re excited to partner again in this round alongside Lightspeed. The company’s name changed. The idea changed. The person we invested in didn’t.

Congratulations to Aryo, Tinah, and everyone at Andera. Two years ago we couldn’t have told you what the company would do. Neither could Aryo. That was never the bet. The bet was that whatever the answer turned out to be, he’d be the one to find it.