Company
‍We've worked at industry-leading hardware companies, including SpaceX, Amazon Robotics, L3Harris, and Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Lab. After experiencing repeated bottlenecks in embedded software, we started Metalware to accelerate the pace of hardware development.
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Just a few months into our journey — we were accepted into the Y Combinator program, raised a seed round from leading Silicon Valley investors, and began working with amazing early customers. Here is the behind-the-scenes story of our founders, from childhood obsessions to starting Metalware.
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Formative years
Andrew Nedea was born in New York — though he spent most of his childhood in Romania — and has been programming computers since he was practically in the womb. He made his first dollar building a consumer internet game that reached 400k+ users before he was 15. In Andrew's free time, you can find him at the gym and hacking on side projects.
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Meanwhile, in rural Maryland, Ryan was busy taking apart and rebuilding any electronics product he could get his hands on — from remote control cars to MP3 players to gaming consoles. He made his first dollar fixing broken XBOX 360s and flipping them on Craigslist in middle school. In Ryan's free time, you can find him reading books and training for his next IRONMAN.

Start of the journey
Andrew and Ryan's paths converged while working at SpaceX, where they connected over philosophy, working out, and an appetite for risk. Together, they built the Starlink factory and wrote software that runs on more than 1 million antennas worldwide. They repeatedly found themselves on the "critical path", stressed out due to firmware. Reading datasheets. Register values set incorrectly. Missed errata. Andrew and Ryan set out to solve inefficiencies in firmware development.

Metalware was founded in 2023 to manifest our passion for hard tech + robotics, the culture we embodied at SpaceX, and a blend of Andrew and Ryan's hardware, software, and business expertise. They relocated from Los Angles to San Francisco, moved in together, and immediately got to work.