New York City HQ ᐧ Full time ᐧ On-site (4 days/week) ᐧ R&D ᐧ $140K-$170K + meaningful equity
Prior to Ekho, one of the largest retail segments in the world had no checkout button. If you wanted to buy a vehicle online, the best you could do was fill out an “I’m Interested” form and wait for someone to call you back. Found the bike of your dreams at a dealership two states away? You were mostly on your own. Tax requirements, titling workflows, and registration rules vary by state and county. Most dealers didn’t sell across state lines at all, because they had no reliable way to do it.
Now they can. A buyer finds a bike, clicks “Buy Now,” completes financing and insurance verification online, and gets it delivered to their door in a few days. The whole thing takes as few as ten minutes. And the dealer doesn’t have to be at their desk (let alone awake) for any of it.
The first time one of our dealers woke up to a completed overnight sale, they messaged us: “Oh my God, this is crazy. We just fulfilled a transaction while the whole team was asleep.”
We get messages like this regularly now, and they’re no less exciting than the first one was. What made it possible was 18 months of untangling a combinatorics problem disguised as county-specific titling and registration, and integrating with 50 DMVs that still prefer faxes to APIs. That foundation is built. Now we’re putting AI on top of it, expanding into cars, and building the transaction layer that works in-store as well as online.
One thing worth saying directly: Anthropic can’t ship something tomorrow that makes this company obsolete. The moat is the foundation beneath the code: the 50-state compliance framework, the DMV relationships, and the legal licenses we’ve secured. That’s not something you can prompt your way around. Unlike most startups right now, we’re not racing against the next model update.
Every vehicle sale on our platform touches half a dozen partners: lenders, insurers, inventory management systems, tax and titling providers, OEMs, payment processors. Right now, each new integration is a one-off. You’d build the framework Ekho uses for every new partner integration going forward.
The most interesting integration in front of us is Progressive. They’ve built dedicated infrastructure on their side specifically for Ekho: not just opening up a public API, but standing up new systems for our integration. (Insurers don’t usually build infrastructure for partners; they expose what they expose, and integrators consume it.) When it’s live, we’ll be the first end-to-end online insurance binding flow in powersports. That kind of partnership happened because Ekho is now the kind of company a major insurer wants to be first to integrate with. The next partner you talk to will know about it.
Beyond Progressive, the integrations span an unusual range. On one end: modern partners with well-documented APIs, sometimes (as with Progressive) building dedicated infrastructure for us. On the other: DMVs that still prefer faxes to APIs, and legacy inventory systems where the only way to get data out is via login credentials and structured email parsing. The framework you’d build has to handle that full range gracefully, and you’d be doing it across very different domains: insurance, lending, state government, inventory, payments, OEMs. You'd touch all of them in your first year.
You’ll build creatively but cautiously. Ekho’s partners are regulated entities, and they answer to external regulators, not just internal compliance. A clever technical workaround that a SaaS vendor would shrug off can trigger a security review at a lender, and shut down access in ways that are much harder to undo than the technical work that caused it.
There’s also a meaningful rinse-and-repeat dimension to all of this: once you’ve built the adapter pattern for one inventory system, you’re applying it to the next. Part of the job is figuring out how much of that repetition AI can absorb.
Rowan grew up in South Africa, where his dad owned a used car dealership. Chris grew up in Atlanta, and was close family friends with some of the largest dealer operators in the Southeast. They met at Stanford, went to see what good looked like at scale (Rowan at Duolingo, Chris at Meta), then went through YC determined to find the most overlooked problem in the largest industry they could. This one—a $2 trillion industry that couldn’t complete a sale online—was the one that stuck.
Bongi, our VP of Eng, has known Rowan since high school. He turned down several of Rowan’s ideas before finally saying yes to this one. That kind of conviction from someone who knows the founder well enough to say “no” is its own kind of signal.
Brian leads our partnerships work, which means he’s the person you’d work most closely with day-to-day. He came to Ekho from Silver Lake (private equity) by way of Goldman, and is one of Chris and Rowan’s oldest friends. He’s also been involved with Cycle for Survival for the last four years, the last two as a rider on the Silver Lake team.
We’re 34 people, mostly in our mid-to-late twenties, with backgrounds across Stanford, YC, BCG, Goldman, and Meta. Nine of us are engineers. We spend four days a week together in our Flatiron office.
Nadim has kept every laptop from every job he’s ever had. They’re now racked in a server farm in his apartment running AI agents (before that it was crypto). David edits a sci-fi publication online and curates the strangest stories you’ve ever read. Alexis is working on becoming a DJ and producer (his genre is deep house). Jon studied film and posts photos to Slack that make everyone else’s iPhone photography look like a crime. Rodrigo can find the Spanish speakers in any room in New York, which is its own kind of superpower.
Mike is our industry vet. He’s in sales, not engineering; but you'd never guess it from the Claude Code usage. He spent decades as an executive at Triumph, Piaggio, and Zero Motorcycles, and recently organized a motorcycle track day for the whole team because he found a free event and figured people would want to go. (They did.)
There’s a gong in the middle of the office that goes off without warning every time a sale closes. Engineering debates here are about architecture decisions, ownership boundaries, and what to name things. The naming convention debates alone have generated Slack polls with 15+ options, many of them so bad they’re good. The founders have never said “my way or the highway.” Engineers define what to build and why, not just how. The whole team has an unlimited Claude Code budget, and it’s not just an engineering thing. People across the company are shipping with AI.
You’re already AI-pilled. You’ve got Claude Code open, and you’re prototyping with it, running agents, and automating away the rinse-and-repeat parts of your own work.
You’re low ego and high slope. You’d rather take on something you haven’t done before than insist on the thing you already know. You're coachable, and you take feedback as information rather than as a personal attack. (We’ve hit the limit on this one before; it matters.)
You’re comfortable with isolation. Most of your projects won’t have an engineering peer on them: you’ll be paired with our partnerships lead, working solo on the codebase side. That suits some people and stresses others. If having no one to brainstorm with at 3 pm sounds frustrating, this m