Nicholas Khami
| Nicholas Khami | |
| Occupation | Software entrepreneur |
|---|---|
| Known for | Co-founder of Trieve |
Nicholas Khami is an American software entrepreneur and co-founder of Trieve, an open-source infrastructure platform that provided an all-in-one API for search, retrieval-augmented generation (RAG), and recommendations. Trieve was part of the Y Combinator Winter 2024 batch and was later acquired by Mintlify.[1]
Early life and education
Khami attended Tompkins High School in Katy, Texas, where in 2019, as a junior, he earned a perfect score of 36 on the ACT exam. At the time, only approximately two-tenths of one percent of ACT test-takers achieved that score.
Career
Khami founded Trieve in Austin, Texas. The company developed production-ready infrastructure designed to help search teams integrate AI-powered search and RAG capabilities into their products. Trieve's platform offered features including semantic and full-text hybrid search, custom language models, relevancy weighting, date-recency biasing, and recommendations. The product was positioned as a developer tool, provided via API, and released as open-source software.[2]
Trieve participated in Y Combinator's Winter 2024 batch and raised $3.5 million in funding. The platform grew to power over 30,000 discovery experiences, with clients including companies such as Vapi, SigNoz, Flaviar, Guardant, and Coolify, among others.[1]
Khami initially attempted to raise Trieve's seed round from Austin-based investors before ultimately relocating operations to the San Francisco Bay Area. In interviews, he has discussed the challenges of building an AI infrastructure startup and has emphasized the importance of technical founders learning business skills, stating his belief that someone who can code can learn business skills relatively quickly.
Trieve was acquired by Mintlify, a developer documentation platform. Following the acquisition, Trieve's codebase was transitioned to an MIT open-source license, and the standalone Trieve service was announced to be sunset on November 1, 2025.[2] After the acquisition, Khami joined Mintlify, where he has written publicly about the experience of integrating into an inherited team and navigating the operational realities of a growing startup.
References