Meet ArchAstro: Ex-Stripe, Microsoft and Meta vets assemble powerhouse team for cross-company AI agents

ArchAstro just emerged from stealth with an artificial intelligence network designed to automate complex, cross-company software deployments and integrations.

Founded earlier this year by a team of veteran engineers from Microsoft, Stripe, Statsig and Meta, the Seattle-area startup is tackling a complex problem — the prolonged period it often takes for corporate clients to integrate newly purchased software into custom enterprise environments.

ArchAstro is led by co-founder and CEO Vivek Sharma, a former Microsoft distinguished engineer who most recently worked 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 the time, he simply offered a cryptic message that they were using “AI’s potential to fundamentally change how people work.”

Now, more details are coming to light, including pre-seed funding of $6.2 million from a marquee list of investors. 

In a blog post announcing the new company, Sharma said “even the simplest B2B software requires hand-to-hand combat to properly integrate.”

Hand-to-hand combat may be an apt description of the challenging business problem that ArchAstro is looking 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 work across distinct corporate boundaries. 

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

“The key thing we’re enabling is a continuous connection enforced with code, built off the most current context across both companies,” Sharma tells GeekWire. 

Of course, there is always the concern of possible data leakage between two entities — a potential showstopper for any corporate chief information security officer. But Sharma said they are addressing that concern. 

Since customers control their own agents and how they operate, they choose how they interact. 

“Instead of moving data between companies and managing leak risk, you’re just adhering to shared ‘acceptance tests’ that ArchAstro hosted agents create and maintain across both,” Sharma said. “Code is also easy to evaluate and check for correctness. This is how engineering systems have always worked, and we’re extending that discipline between companies rather than within one.” 

Sharma said the ArchAstro system also could be used to help answer cross-company questions, like a custom agent assisting account managers with their customers. 

“Either way, we work with the customer to share only what’s appropriate, and our runtime enforces that with additional safeguards layered on as needed,” he said. 

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

“Product teams ship fast, but customers take months, sometimes years, to deploy what they buy,” Sharma noted. He added that delayed deployments result in revenue loss, customer churn and engineering burnout spent debugging individual setups rather than building what is next.

The system is designed to plug directly into existing developer workflows, including Cursor, Claude and Codex.

Given the complexities involved, Sharma’s founding engineering team includes veterans who previously worked on some thorny technical challenges: Microsoft Exchange Server and Office 365, Stripe Billing and Connect, and engineering platforms at Meta, Atlassian and Statsig.

The team includes: 

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

Rakesh Parida, Head of Forward Deployed Engineering at Stripe, said utilizing AI agents to create strong technical connections between companies is a major strategic advantage. 

“ArchAstro is making that model repeatable at scale, enabling continuous integrations, deployments, and migrations across companies, with the security, (forward deployed engineering) oversight, and judgment that serious software partnerships require,” Parida said. “The future of software partnerships isn’t just about going live together. It’s about staying live together.”

Two Fortune 500 companies have already begun utilizing the platform as design partners, though Sharma declined to say who they are. There’s also the potential threat of Microsoft, Google, Amazon or others entering the market, given their interests in making sure B2B customers are satisfied in deploying agentic AI systems.

Sharma said they are fully expecting competition in the nascent sector, and in some cases they are already speaking to the big players.

“But their demand is so high that they don’t have the time or the focused energy to build a solution like ours,” he said. “We think we can accelerate their revenue and help these larger companies scale even further.”

ArchAstro is backed by venture capital firms 20VC — the London-based firm led by Harry Stebbings — and Kyber Knight — whose investments include Cruise, SpaceX and Anduril. Its angel investors include a who’s who of technology leaders:

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

Based in Seattle, the company employs seven people. Sharma said they are deliberately “staying lean,” adding that a smaller team forces them to be “extremely nimble and invent a path to value.”

He’s also excited to build the startup in Seattle, which he says has “some of the best engineers anywhere.”

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