Chima Builds Enterprise LLM Tools and Expands San Francisco Team

Chima is a San Francisco-based AI infrastructure company building tools to help institutions customize and scale generative AI. Founded in 2023, the 7-person Seed stage startup enables enterprises to integrate public data and internal enterprise data so they can privately run commercial language models.

Co-founded by sisters Nikhara Nirghin and Kiara Nirghin, Chima emerged from Y Combinator's W23 batch. The company has raised over $5 million from investors including Y Combinator, Liquid 2 Ventures, Soma Capital, General Catalyst, and Elad Gil, as reported by Briefly News.

Founder Backgrounds and Research Stack

Chief Executive Officer Nikhara Nirghin previously worked in consulting and finance at Goldman Sachs and Deloitte Consulting. She holds an MBA from London Business School and completed degrees in Mathematical Statistics and Actuarial Science at the University of the Witwatersrand, where she earned an award for stochastic data modeling.

Chief Technology Officer Kiara Nirghin won the global 2016 Google Science Fair grand prize before completing her Bachelor's and Master's degrees in Computer Science at Stanford University with a focus on artificial intelligence and human-computer interaction. Her research background includes fellowships with Thiel Capital and Alexis Ohanian's 776 Foundation. In a video interview with Amplify - Dr. Ayesha Khanna, she described Chima as an applied AI research lab focused on turning multimodal agents into autonomous applications for real-world enterprise workflows.

Chima maintains a rapidly evolving technical stack and looks for candidates with publications in top AI conferences, experience at labs like OpenAI, Google Brain, or DeepMind, experience building large-scale search, recommendation, or ads products, and contributions to open-source software.

Enterprise AI Roles and Engineering Hiring

Chima is hiring across technical and go-to-market roles to support its deployment inside enterprise systems. Speaking on a Forbes panel, Kiara Nirghin noted that while software tools make developers more productive, enterprise knowledge work like customer support and paperwork is shifting to agentic workflows.

To build these enterprise systems, Chima is hiring an onsite AI Engineer in San Francisco. The role involves designing, developing, and deploying AI models and generative features to solve enterprise problems while collaborating with cross-functional teams, senior executives, and engineers to build end-to-end AI solutions at scale.

On the product side, the company is looking for a Frontend Engineer to develop new user-facing features, manage frontend infrastructure, implement Storybook, and optimize web application performance while speaking with startup and enterprise customers. Chima is also recruiting a Senior Full-Stack Engineer to build UIs and APIs using Next.js, React, and TypeScript, own features end-to-end, design microservices, build cloud infrastructure, and convert customer requirements into product features.

For its commercial operations in San Francisco, Chima is adding a Senior Sales Development Representative to build a sales pipeline from scratch and meet sales targets in a 100% in-person role. The team is also hiring a Senior Account Executive to manage the entire sales cycle from lead qualification to closing deals exceeding $100,000.

Open Roles at Chima

See all open roles at Chima