Image: LinkedIn@/daerogroup
It started, improbably, with a message most of us would have ignored. Buried among the usual LinkedIn noise of job updates and pitches was a note from a teenager in Mumbai to a Stanford grad student he had never met. Neither knew it then, but that small act of digital courage would set off a chain of events spanning three cities, two continents, and a problem hiding in plain sight inside America’s $2 trillion construction industry. What followed was the story of a startup coming together, a journey of three immigrants, each carrying a different piece of the puzzle, discovering that their paths were quietly converging toward the same idea.The cold LinkedIn message from Aajinkya Singh, a self-taught engineer from Mumbai, landed in the inbox of Abhinav Jha, then a graduate student at Stanford. Today, the two are co-founders of one of the fastest-growing construction technology startups in the United States.Aajinkya enrolled in college at 15, taught himself to code at 16, and sold his first software product to a Dubai-based company at 17. His passion for building products led him to juggle multiple part-time roles throughout college, gaining hands-on experience in software development and entrepreneurship. Initially, Aajinkya reached out to Abhinav to learn more about the US college application process. Instead, the conversation quickly evolved into a shared vision: starting a company together.Before Stanford, Abhinav had left a promising career at Deloitte, where he became one of the firm’s youngest Managers. As the founder of a 30-person non-profit, he had long been driven by the desire to build something of his own.For more than a year, Abhinav and Aajinkya explored multiple ideas, none of which gained significant traction. That changed in January 2025, when Abhinav received a call from his friend Alex Park, a Korean immigrant and former construction project manager. Frustrated by how existing tools were built for managers rather than builders, Alex had left his job to pursue an MBA at MIT Sloan with a clear goal: to start a company that would transform construction workflows.In January 2025, the trio formally teamed up to form DAERO. Within weeks, they deployed a minimum viable product on active job sites, serving general contractors and subcontractors on multi-billion-dollar commercial projects across the US.After his full-time day job, Aajinkya spent his nights building and maintaining the product to keep DAERO moving forward. Alex and Abhinav had previously worked with other co-founders, but the dynamic shifted when Aajinkya joined. “With Aajinkya, we went from resolving issues in days to minutes,” they recalled. For six months, the team operated fully remotely – Alex in Boston, Abhinav in the San Francisco Bay Area, and Aajinkya in Mumbai – while DAERO actively served customers.Within a few months, DAERO was accepted into several MIT and Stanford accelerator programs, including MIT Design X and Breakthrough Ventures. With the $5,000 in non-dilutive funding the team received, Aajinkya was able to make his first international trip to Stanford, California, marking the first occasion the trio united in-person.During that two-week visit, the team raised a $2 million round from leading Venture Capital funds including Threshold Ventures and NFX. NFX is known to have this highest “unicorn rate”, with 25 out of their 232 investments turning into billion dollar companies.Two months ago, Aajinkya relocated to the United States on an O-1A visa, granted to individuals with extraordinary ability – a fitting milestone for the exceptional 22-year-old.If there’s a lesson in DAERO’s rise, it’s that breakthroughs rarely arrive with fanfare; rather, they unfold through thousands of unglamorous decisions, late-night coding sessions, and conversations that start with no agenda except curiosity. It’s also a reminder that extraordinary outcomes often begin with ordinary gestures: a cold message, a friend’s frustration, a willingness to build before it’s perfect. For Aajinkya, Alex, and Abhinav, DAERO is the product of three improbable journeys colliding at exactly the right moment. And if the last two years are any indication, the company’s story is still in its opening chapters: proof that in the right hands, even construction’s oldest problems can spark a new kind of American dream.Cofounders of DAERO Go to Source