Arjun Jain, Kunal Jain, and Lokesh Kamanboina are Building Tandem to Bring the Efficiency of AI to Hardware Engineering
AI is transforming software engineering faster than anything we’ve witnessed in recent history. But amidst the AI revolution, hardware and mechanical engineering have been left largely unchanged, with work still scattered across disconnected tools, teams, and manual processes.
Many mechanical engineers spend countless hours on documentation, requirement verification, and design reviews—tasks that are error-prone and slow the entire development cycle. And because mechanical engineers don’t always document why design decisions were made, teams are often forced to reconstruct reasoning from scratch when revisiting a product.
Twin brothers Arjun and Kunal Jain experienced these challenges first-hand while working as engineers at Rolls-Royce and Boeing, respectively. Recognizing that AI-native tooling could be developed to transform traditional mechanical engineering workflows, they teamed up with software engineer Lokesh Kamanboina to build Tandem.
Introducing Tandem: An AI-native Platform for Hardware Engineering
Tandem builds AI agents that automate manual processes across the entire mechanical engineering development cycle. The platform’s AI-native system unifies design intent, requirements, CAD changes, and validation evidence so teams can automate repetitive work and accelerate hardware development.
Grounded in a team’s own processes and data, Tandem’s AI generates concrete engineering outputs like ECO drafts, design reviews, drawings, DFM feedback, impact reports, assembly documentation, and traceability reports. It also brings the version control, collaboration, and easy information retrieval that software engineers have long taken for granted but are less common in hardware.
"We build agents that automate a lot of the manual processes within the mechanical engineering development cycle,” explains Arjun. “Whether that's systems engineering and requirement verification and validation, watching engineers as they design to automate things like ECOs, or the unnecessary documentation mechanical engineers have to do."
In just eight months since launching, Tandem has already raised a $4.9M round led by Foundation Capital and is being used by teams across complex hardware industries.
The Journey to Building Tandem
Arjun and Kunal Jain grew up doing mechanical engineering and design work from a young age. After college, Arjun joined Rolls-Royce as an aerospace engineer, where he worked on the F-35B fighter jet. When, ahead of a redesign project, he was asked to find out why an older engine had been designed the way it was, he spent nearly six months reconstructing the past design rationale. Previous engineers had documented their reasoning poorly, leaving him digging through a paper trail to piece together clues.
Kunal, meanwhile, was working on Boeing’s 787 “Feature Development” team, running technical feasibility on new cabin features against thousands of requirements across parts, safety, and FAA standards. He quickly found that humans are slow and error-prone at verification and validation, impacting the speed at which ideas could be brought to fruition.
Arjun and Kunal recognized that both of the problems they were facing had a common theme—mechanical engineering workflows were being hindered by their reliance on human processes and manual tasks. So they teamed up with Lokesh Kamanboina, who was then only a year into college but dropped out to join as CTO. "I noticed that mechanical engineering was so far behind software tools," Lokesh says. "We started brainstorming how AI could be used in the mechanical engineer's workspace, and that led us to Tandem."
In the long run, the team aims for Tandem to become the default AI-native platform—the "context layer"—for hardware engineers, saving them time and money and helping them get to redesign far faster.
The Team’s Advice for Fellow Founders
Although the Tandem team has achieved remarkable results in the eight months since launching, they admit that the founder journey can have real ups and downs. “It's not all the highs you see on social media and TikTok,” Arjun says. “It's very much a rollercoaster—and you have to stay grounded and level out the highs and lows, because there are definitely a lot of them.”
And as you grow, Kunal adds, “treat networking as important as possible, not a nice-to-have. The people you know—the real relationships you build—are what helps you build an amazing and strong business. Try to network, try to build genuine relationships with people, because that's what helps you in the long run."
To learn more about Tandem, you can follow Arjun, Kunal, and Lokesh on LinkedIn and visit tandem.inc.
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