Meet ArchAstro: Ex-Stripe, Microsoft and Meta vets assemble powerhouse in corporate AI

ArchAstro recently broke ground with an artificial intelligence network designed to automate complex, cross-company software deployment and integration.

Founded earlier this year by a team of veteran developers from Microsoft, Stripe, Statsig and Meta, the Seattle-based startup tackles a complex problem – the long time it often takes for corporate clients to integrate newly purchased software into custom business environments.

ArchAstro is led by founder and CEO Vivek Sharma, a former prominent Microsoft engineer who most recently served in technical leadership roles at Meta and Stripe.

GeekWire first got wind of the new startup back in January, when we noted Sharma’s departure from Stripe. At that time, he simply gave a secret message that they were using “the power of AI to change the way people work.”

Now, more details will come to light, including pre-seed funding of $6.2 million from a marquee lineup of investors.

In a blog post announcing the new company, Sharma said that “even simple B2B software requires hand-wringing to be well integrated.”

Hand-to-hand combat may be an apt description of the challenging business problem ArchAstro seeks to tackle, an endeavor that Sharma admits is “a very difficult problem.”

Traditional artificial intelligence agents tend to operate entirely within a single organization’s firewall, while ArchAstro’s agents are designed to operate across separate business boundaries.

Connecting these disparate systems securely is no easy task. That’s why the company says its “privacy-aware” AI agents – what it calls Forward Agents – are designed to handle cross-company integrations, migrations and bug fixes quickly and securely.

“The key thing we’re enabling is continuous code-enforced communication, built into the current context of both companies,” Sharma tells GeekWire.

Of course, there are always concerns about potential data leaks between two organizations – something that can be a concern for any chief information security officer. But Sharma said they are addressing those concerns.

As customers control their agents and how they work, they choose how they interact.

“Instead of moving data between companies and managing the risk of leakage, you’re stuck with shared ‘acceptance testing’ done by ArchAstro’s classic hosted agents and stored on both,” Sharma said. “The code is also easily tested and checked for correctness. This is how systems engineers have always worked, and it extends that behavior between companies and not within one.”

Sharma said the ArchAstro system can also be used to help answer questions for different companies, like a custom agent helping account managers with their clients.

“In any case, we work with the customer to share only what is appropriate, and our operating hours emphasize that with additional safeguards in place when needed,” he said.

In that regard, ArchAstro acts as a secure, automated translation layer, allowing two completely different enterprise systems to speak the same language and quickly verify each other’s work based on a shared set of rules. That seamless, secure flow of collaboration between companies translates directly into dollars saved.

“Product teams move quickly, but customers take months, sometimes years, to ship their purchases,” Sharma notes. He added that shipping delays lead to lost revenue, customer churn and engineering burnout spent fixing each setup error rather than building the next one.

The program is designed to connect directly to existing developer workflows, including Cursor, Claude and Codex.

Given the complexity involved, Sharma’s engineering team includes veterans who have worked on technical challenges such as: Microsoft Exchange Server and Office 365, Stripe Billing and Connect, and engineering platforms at Meta, Atlassian and Statsig.

The team includes:

• Tore Hanssen, a former founding engineer at Statsig, a Bellevue, Wash.-based startup that was acquired last September by OpenAI. He previously worked at Meta.
• Robert Masson, a senior staff data scientist in Meta’s Seattle office, spent nearly 11 years with the company before moving to Atlassian early last year.
• Calvin Grunewald, who spent nine years as Facebook’s director of engineering, is based in Seattle. Most recently he was at Stripe.
• Rafael Brandao Lobo, a founding engineer who spent over a decade building brand advertising and gaming products on Facebook/Meta.
• Bruno Garcia, an open source developer who previously worked at PlayCo and Sega.

Rakesh Parida, Head of Forward Deployed Engineering at Stripe, said using AI agents to build strong technology connections between companies is a huge strategic advantage.

“ArchAstro multiplies that model at scale, enabling continuous integration, deployment, and migration across companies, with the monitoring, (forward-distributed engineering) and judgment required by software partnerships,” Parida said. “The future of software partnerships isn’t just about staying together. It’s about staying together.”

Two Fortune 500 companies have already started using the platform as design partners, though Sharma declined to say who they are. There is also a potential threat of Microsoft, Google, Amazon or others entering the market, given their interests in ensuring that B2B customers are satisfied in deploying agent AI systems.
Sharma said that they fully expect to compete in emerging sectors, while in others they are already talking to big players.
“But their demand is so high that they don’t have the time or energy to focus on creating a solution like ours,” he said. “We think we can accelerate their capital and help these great companies grow even more.”

ArchAstro is supported with venture capital firms 20VC – a London-based firm led by Harry Stebbings – and Kyber Knight – invested by Cruise, SpaceX and Anduril. Its angel investors include a who’s who of technology leaders:

• Will Gaybrick (President of Technology and Business at Stripe)
• Claire Hughes Johnson (Former COO, Stripe)
• Vijaye Raji (founder of Statsig, now CTO of OpenAI for applications)
• Vlad Fedorov (CTO, GitHub)
• Karandeep Anand (CEO, Character.ai)
• Deb Liu (Former VP Meta, CEO of Ancestry)
• Ash Jhaveri (SVP at Meta)
• Akin Babayigit (Co-founder, Tripeldot Studios)

Based in Seattle, the company employs seven people. Sharma said they “remain lean” on purpose, adding that a small group forces them to be “more intelligent and create a path to value.”

He’s also excited to set up shop in Seattle, which he says has “the best engineers anywhere.”

“If you want to be a serious B2B company, at some point you have to go up to Seattle,” he said.