Kabir Nagrecha is the founder and CEO of Tessera Labs, the AI-native systems integrator that automates enterprise ERP modernization. He started college at 13, earned a computer science PhD from UC San Diego at 20, and raised a $60 million Series A led by Andreessen Horowitz in May 2026 (a16z; Forbes).
A childhood inside ERP programs
Raised in London and California, he spent his childhood as the unofficial assistant to his father, who worked in high-level IT roles on ERP transformation projects at firms such as Jacobs Engineering. By age eight he was sitting in on large program stand-ups and helping build the PowerPoint decks used to brief executives, which taught him how slow and change-order driven traditional systems-integrator projects could be (Forbes).
“There was this constant frustration of, 'Hey, how can we not run this in-house? Why do we not have the capability to do this ourselves?'” he later told Forbes (Forbes).
Research path and founding Tessera
He started college at 13, graduated from UC San Diego with a computer science degree at 17, and earned his PhD there at 20. His advisor called him the strongest research student he had mentored, with an unprecedented slate of research accolades, according to Andreessen Horowitz. He then did AI research at Meta and spent time at Netflix before founding Tessera (a16z).
In the 18 months before the Series A he closed multimillion-dollar ACV contracts with large enterprise CIOs and recruited more than 30 people, including six from Netflix. Co-founder Ming Chang is pictured with him in Forbes coverage of the round, which valued Tessera at $320 million. Forbes reported active work with Merck and Xerox and trials with other Fortune 500 enterprises (a16z; Forbes). Our Tessera Labs review covers the firm.