How an 18-year-old high school dropout raised $6.2M

Executive overview

Arlan Rakhmetzhanov dropped out of 11th grade in Kazakhstan, moved to San Francisco via London, and got into YC Summer 2025 — all before turning 19. His company, Nozomio, builds Nia, an API that reduces code hallucinations in coding agents like Cursor.

Relentless, specific outreach — not talent — is what separates founders who break into elite rooms from those who don't.

Background and path to YC

• Heard about YC from his dad at age 10; his dad later applied and was rejected, which sharpened Arlan's motivation.
• Built his first product at 15 — an AI scholarship tool for high school students — reaching 20k active users.
• Initially framed everything around a Stanford application; recognised this was holding him back.
• Got accepted into Entrepreneurs First (London) at 16, quit school, and relocated.
• Applied to YC while in London; accepted into Summer 2025 batch.

The product: Nia and the coding agent problem

• Coding agents like Cursor hallucinate because they lack up-to-date documentation for fast-moving packages and SDKs.
• Nia is an API that gives agents current, precise context — reducing hallucinations and saving developers 2–5 hours per week.
• Developer tools distribute globally by default; no reason to think locally.

Collison installations: going to users' homes

• Adopted the Collison installation method: physically going to users' offices and homes to install the product and watch them use it.
• Covered 22% of his YC batch and 5% of the Stream batch as paying customers.
• Grew to $11k MRR in four weeks using this approach.
• Posted every install publicly; gave merch to participants.
• Asked every new user to "roast my product" — actively sought harsh feedback.

Cold email and persistence: the PG story

• PG publicly roasted Arlan's pitch in front of ~100 founders at a YC talk.
• Arlan waited until PG left, chased his car, and asked for a follow-up office hour.
• Subject line of his follow-up email: "The kid who stopped you in the end" — direct, memorable, impossible to ignore.
• Got the office hour; PG invested.

Cold email principles

• Subject line is everything — generic words like "inquiry" or "exclusive" signal spam and get archived instantly.
• Keep emails to 4–5 sentences; state what you want immediately.
• Bad subjects Arlan used early: "inquiry", "seeking for", "exclusive" — he would have trashed those himself.
• Good subjects are direct and reference a shared moment or hook.
• Don't stop after one email. Arlan sent follow-ups for two months to land an internship with the head of VC at Stanford — persistence converted a non-answer into a yes.

Mindset

• University's real value is community and network, not credentials.
• Most people self-limit by assuming drive and curiosity are innate rather than chosen.
• "Go do the thing" is the only advice that compounds.