A small studio, deliberately.
Founded in 2021 in Austin, TX. We stayed small on purpose — coordination cost is the tax most agencies quietly pass on to their clients.
- Founded in Austin, Texas
- 2021Founded in Austin, Texas
- Developers mentored
- 180+Developers mentored
- Products shipped to production
- 40+Products shipped to production
- US time zones covered
- 4US time zones covered
Our story
Built by people who had seen it done badly.
Nexa started with three engineers who had spent a decade inside consultancies and had the same complaint about all of them: the incentive was to be needed, not to be useful. Projects ended with a codebase nobody on the client side could confidently change, and a proposal for phase two.
We built the opposite. Every engagement is planned around its handover. We work in your repository from the first commit, pair with your engineers from week four, and step back deliberately at the end so your team leads while we still have time to help.
The mentorship programme grew out of the same instinct. If our job is to leave teams stronger, it seemed inconsistent to hire only people other companies had already trained. So we started training them ourselves — paid, on real work, from week one — and it turned out to make our delivery better rather than slower.
Six things we won’t trade away.
These are load-bearing. When a project conflicts with one of them, the project changes.
Evidence over enthusiasm
We build the measurement before the feature. If we cannot tell whether a change made things better, we have not finished designing it — and that applies to AI work more than anything else.
Small teams, senior hands
Nothing ships without a senior engineer’s name on it. Pods stay small on purpose: coordination cost is the tax most agencies quietly pass on to their clients.
Teaching is engineering
Explaining a decision clearly is how we find out whether it was a good one. Mentoring is not a side programme here; it is embedded in how every project runs.
Leave it owned
Success is your team shipping confidently without us. We write the documentation, run the pairing sessions and plan the exit from the first week, not the last.
Say the hard thing early
Scope that will not fit, an approach that will not hold, a deadline that is fiction — you hear it from us while there is still time to act on it.
Doors stay open
Talent is evenly distributed; access is not. We hire on demonstrated ability, pay apprentices properly, and keep our workshops free for non-profit programmes.
How we got here.
- 2021
Nexa founded in Austin
Three engineers, one client, and a conviction that consultancies should leave teams stronger than they found them.
- 2022
First apprenticeship cohort
Six apprentices, paid from day one, embedded in client pods from week three. Five are still engineers today; two of them work here.
- 2023
AI practice formed
We stopped treating LLM work as an experiment and started treating it as engineering — evaluation harnesses, guardrails, cost budgets.
- 2024
180th developer mentored
Across apprenticeships, 1:1 mentoring and team coaching, with workshops running free for non-profit programmes.
- 2026
Where we are now
A senior-led team across four US time zones, still small on purpose, still shipping with the people who will own the result.
The people you’ll actually work with.
No account managers, no bait-and-switch staffing. The engineers on your first call are the engineers on your project.
Rowan Ellis
Co-founder & Principal Engineer
AI systems, evaluation, architecture
Priya Raghavan
Co-founder & Head of Delivery
Product engineering, embedded pods
Marcus Okonjo
Director of Mentorship
Apprenticeship, curriculum, coaching
Sofia Lindqvist
Principal Platform Engineer
Cloud, delivery pipelines, reliability
Theo Marchetti
Design Lead
Interface design, design systems
Amara Boateng
Staff Engineer
Retrieval, data platforms, Postgres
Work with us
Come and meet the whole team.
One call, no deck, no discovery workshop to sell you a discovery workshop. Just engineers talking about your problem.
Or email hello@nexa.com · Austin, Texas · United States