When Aryaman Shrivastava (CAS’26) spent over a month reading documentation before he could start coding during his tech internships, he knew there had to be a better way. This frustrating experience sparked the idea for Stava, an AI-powered developer tool designed to dramatically reduce onboarding time for software engineers.
“I thought to myself, I’m wasting a lot of time,” says Aryaman, recalling his internship experiences. “And so I went out and spoke to developers, team leads, CTOs, and we figured out that this was indeed a universal problem.”
Aryaman and his co-founder Richie Jiang (Questrom’27) met through a stroke of serendipity. Both transfer students—Aryaman from Arizona State University and Richie from the University of San Diego—they were placed as roommates in overflow housing at the Hyatt. When Richie learned about Aryaman’s idea, he saw an opportunity to contribute his business acumen to complement Aryaman’s technical expertise.
“He had this wonderful idea he’d been working on for a bit, and I said, you know, since I’m from business, we match,” Richie explains.
The problem they’re tackling is significant. With over 36,000 computer science and engineering job openings in the US annually, companies lose more than $1.5 billion each year due to inefficient developer onboarding processes. Even a fractional improvement in productivity could create substantial returns.
Stava works by providing real-time, context-aware feedback to developers directly in their code editor. This happens at the pull request stage, when a junior developer wants to merge their code with the larger project and a senior developer typically needs to review it.
“We provide that feedback first so that the senior developer can focus on the real major issues and not waste their time on minor bugs,” says Aryaman. By integrating their extension into a company’s codebase, Stava transforms what might take days or hours into a process that takes just seconds or minutes.
The journey to Stava wasn’t straightforward. Aryaman initially launched a different product—a code editor for beginners—about a year ago. While it attracted over 100 users, retention was poor, indicating that they weren’t addressing a specific enough problem. Through extensive customer research, including interviews with approximately 16 companies like Microsoft and Apple, they discovered a consistent pain point around developer onboarding.
“A constant trend, a similar complaint almost, was that developer onboarding was extremely inefficient,” says Richie. “Most of these companies did not have a solution for it, either because they didn’t dive deep into the problem, or people were complaining but not to high enough individuals.”
The team is now about two weeks away from completing their first prototype and is in talks with several companies to pilot their program. They plan to offer these initial pilots for free to gather quantitative feedback, which is where funding from competitions like the New Venture Competition becomes crucial.
“If we do win the $20K, a large chunk of that will go towards development, R&D, and back-end costs,” Aryaman explains. “Because if we want to pilot a program at these companies for free so that they have an incentive, that will cost money from our end.”
Beyond the potential funding, the team values the connections and exposure that come with participating in the competition. They’ve already spoken with program directors and are building a network to support their growth.
Aryaman envisions a future where the speed at which developers learn any project or codebase is limited only by their own learning capacity, not by organizational inefficiencies.
“The end goal is a world where people can learn any project, learn any codebase, and the speed that they learn is completely reliant on their own learning speed rather than organizational inefficiencies,” he says.
As Stava continues to develop, Aryaman and Richie exemplify how chance encounters, personal frustrations, and complementary skill sets can come together to solve significant industry problems. Their solution not only addresses a billion-dollar inefficiency but also promises to make the onboarding experience smoother for the next generation of developers.
