Arya Tandon
Founder of Stealth Startup
London, England
Overview
Work Experience
Hire #1
2025 - Current
Wearing multiple hats across GTM, operations, product, people, data and more.
Founder
2023
Embarc is an events-based community for future founders. We’re taking future founders from 0 to 1 - helping them to map their careers and join start-ups, quit their corporate jobs to build things they care about, and making the difference between founding & not-founding. We're a VC-backed start-up holding events across London, with partners including Google, Snowflake, Entrepreneur First, Antler and more. 1,100+ members and counting. Sign up here: https://www.embarc.club/ I am also a Visiting Fellow at Zinc. Zinc backs exceptional talent to build new commercial solutions that solve the most pressing societal issues. As a Fellow, I support the cohort of 50 talented founders to build commercial, scalable businesses that tackle some of the toughest problems facing people and the planet.
Co-Founder
2024 - 2025
Building AI-powered automation in healthcare.
Investor & Operations
2022 - 2024
Early-stage VC investing (pre-seed to Series B), operations and data. Ran Notion Capital's high-velocity pre-seed/seed strategy, Pioneers - "start-up within a VC" - overseeing dozens of investments at the earliest stages. Leant into vertical AI/ML applications and SaaS for traditional industries, as well as investing across deeptech, biotech, health & climate. Investments I personally worked on and/or led: Fertifa (Board Observer), Vivan Therapeutics, Trunk.works, Humble AI, Fixed Construction, Kestrix, SeeChange, Fantix AI. Focused on both investing and investment operations. Product Manager for Notion's in-house deal-sourcing software. Developed data-driven strategy, improving investment process & tech stack. Managed angel network across Europe. Notion Capital is a leading venture capital firm investing in B2B software in Europe. Notion is also the founder of Included VC, a programme diversifying the VC industry. I was also a partner VC and judge for Focal, Europe's leading open access demo day.
Special Projects
2022 - 2022
As Encord's (YC W21, now post-Series B) 2nd commercial employee, focused on commercial efforts in healthcare AI for radiology. Worked closely with the founders to drive cross-functional projects spanning Operations, Data, GTM and Recruitment. Built data-driven GTM funnel and A/B tested website for inbound leads, created technical product demos, led SOC 2 process incl. vendor procurement, sourced first SDRs & ran interviews.
Encord is an AI data development platform for computer vision and multimodal AI teams.
Raised $50,000,000.00 from Y Combinator, Next47, Crane Venture Partners and CRV.
Technical Product Manager
2021 - 2022
Founding Team member at Academy, a LocalGlobe-backed edtech start-up retraining grads from diverse backgrounds into software engineering. I worked as Product Manager for a team of software engineers, as "Chief of Staff" for the Head of Tech, and on strategic initiatives with the Co-Founders. • Single-handedly owned Academy's B Corp registration from start to finish over 5 months. Placed in the top 5% with a score of 116, Academy was recognized as a B Lab 2022 Best For The World™ company. • Built Academy Data Central from scratch – a comprehensive data product capturing real-time, granular insights on trainees & customers. Proved our impact to partners, investors & the public. • Product Manager for a team of 3 software engineers, building a learning assistant bot to support our trainees & teaching faculty, and automate data collection. • Worked on Academy's investor pitch for Series A & analysis of European tech markets for expansion. Wrote our "Work from Anywhere" playbook & our first industry white paper on diversity in tech.
Special Projects Lead
2021 - 2022
Driving cross-functional efforts across brand (mission & comms), people (culture), product, programme & operations to launch impactful initiatives that help Academy deliver on its mission.
Trainee Software Engineer
2021 - 2021
Founding Scholar at Academy, part of their first cohort of software engineers. Completed 4 months of fullstack software engineering training via Academy's programme.
Associate (offer)
2020 - 2021
Offer-holder in cohort of ~45 out of ~5k applicants. Converted from generalist offer to BCG Technology and Digital Advantage (TDA), BCG's fastest-growing practice focused on technology cases.
BCG Securities focuses on wealth management with high net worth individuals.
Research Assistant
2020 - 2020
Research Assistant for Dr. Blake Ewing at Pembroke College, Oxford. Worked with Dr. Ewing and Dr. Félix Krawtzek of ZOiS Berlin and Nuffield College, Oxford on political science (statistical) analysis of the use of "crisis" language and oppositional behaviour in the UK Parliament over time. Also worked as a research assistant as part of a joint project involving Oxford's DPIR (Department of Politics and International Relations) and WildCRU (Wildlife Conservation Research Unit), Department of Zoology. Analysed conservation policies in manifestos for political parties around the world.
NUS Delegate
2019 - 2019
One of 6 elected delegates representing Oxford University at the National Union of Students conference. 15 candidates ran for NUS Delegate, with an overall election turnout of ~5,000 students.
President
2019 - 2019
Vice President
2018 - 2019