According to Business Insider, three 28-year-old friends—Ali Dastjerdi, Nathan Ondracek, and Samuel Ilkka—have raised an $8 million Series A for their AI startup, Raylu. This brings their total funding to $12 million, led by an early customer, HighlandX, which loved their product. Founded in 2022, Raylu builds AI agents to help private-market investors automate sourcing work. The team currently has 11 people, with plans to grow to 20 by January. The co-founders have a unique pact: an unopened beer sits in their office fridge, to be drunk only if the company collapses, as a reminder that their friendship is what matters most.
Friendship as a foundation
Here’s the thing about starting a company with your best friends: everyone warns you not to do it. The conventional wisdom is that it’s a great way to ruin a relationship. But this trio flipped that script. They see their deep, years-long bond as their core competitive advantage, not a liability. They trust each other implicitly, reset quickly after arguments (“like a sibling relationship,” as Ondracek says), and know each other’s strengths cold. Dastjerdi is the urgency and investor-world savvy, Ondracek is the engineering ace, and Ilkka is the optimistic risk-taker. That’s a pretty solid founding team profile, forged over late-night college brainstorming sessions and a year of living together during the pandemic. The beer ritual is a brilliant, simple symbol. It externalizes the pressure and says, “Look, this venture might not work out, but we will.”
The business of AI agents
So what is Raylu actually doing? They’re in the red-hot space of AI agents, but with a specific, high-value niche: private-market investors. Think venture capital and private equity firms. These investors spend a massive amount of time sourcing deals—scouring for companies, parsing data, identifying opportunities. It’s tedious, manual, and scale-limited. Raylu’s AI agents aim to automate that grunt work. The fact that their Series A was led by a customer, HighlandX, is a powerful signal. It’s one thing for a VC to bet on a trend; it’s another for a user to love a tool so much they demand to invest. That suggests real, tangible product-market fit, which Dastjerdi emphasized is a feeling you can’t mistake. He said when you have it, “people have to rip the product from you.” That’s the goal for any B2B software company, especially one operating in the complex, data-heavy world of finance.
The hardest part isn’t the work
Now, it’s not all beer pacts and smooth sailing. The article highlights some fascinating, subtle challenges. Dastjerdi talks about building a “mental firewall” to stop co-founder mode from bleeding into friend mode. When 99% of your brain is on the company, how do you just hang out? That’s a real skill to learn. Similarly, Ilkka mentioned learning to trust and not micromanage—to not look over his friends’ shoulders. That’s a level of professional discipline layered on top of personal affection. And they’ve had to learn to deliberately celebrate wins, because no one else will do it for you. These are the unglamorous, human operating system updates required to run a friendship-based business. It requires more intentionality than a typical co-founder relationship. But their argument is that the bedrock of trust makes the hard business decisions—pivots, critiques, pressure—easier to weather.
A lesson in people-first building
Basically, their story is a counter-narrative to the “founder as lone genius” myth. Ondracek put it bluntly: “Nothing works if the people don’t work. You can have the most product-market fit, and if the people don’t work, you’re doomed from the start.” That’s a lesson that applies far beyond startups with friendship pacts. It’s about team cohesion at a fundamental level. Their other advice—don’t fall in love with an idea too early, keep iterating, and don’t start a company just because it’s trendy—is standard but hits differently coming from a team that started with the “who” before the “what.” They bet on the team first, the idea second. That’s a high-risk, high-reward strategy. But if your team is truly resilient, maybe it’s the best bet you can make. After all, if it all goes south, you still have your friends. And, according to the pact, you’ll have a beer to share, too.
