Archia boosts safe AI adoption for companies struggling to link the tech to solutions they really need

Mid-market companies in Kansas City and the Midwest are being left out of the AI market, Gharib Gharibi shared, but Archia is developing a platform to include them.

“Nobody talks about it,” continued the co-founder and CEO of the Overland Park-based tech startup. “These companies are struggling to adopt AI. They don’t have AI talent and it’s hard for them to hire it.”

Many are stuck between choosing a hyperscaler or building it themselves, Gharibi added, noting both options are challenging.

“We’re helping these companies to unlock the deployment and adoption of AI,” he said.

Launched in July 2025 by Gharibi and Andrew Rademacher, Archia — which just received funding from the inaugural “Digital Health KC Accelerate” initiative, plus earned Digital Sandbox funding last year and raised a pre-seed round — is focused on accelerating safe adoption of AI agents across all major AI providers via a single API, especially for the businesses in the middle market, which make up one-third of the private sector, Gharibi noted.

“There are over 200,000 of them located in this area,” he explained. “Most of the companies today are not built to help them. Every day they wait without being able to adopt, it’s really harming them big time.”

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Building an AI agent as a demo or as a pilot is actually easy, Gharibi said, as AI coding tools help accelerate that process.

“But taking those agents and deploying them in production is still very hard and challenging,” he added.

Deploying trust

Archia is building and deploying trustworthy agents by creating agent runtime, he noted.

“Think of it as an agent operating system,” he explained. “We built it from the ground up to make sure that security and privacy is baked in and not added after the fact to the system.”

The startup is also giving agents an identity, continued Gharibi, who is among the latest class of Pipeline fellows.

“When companies or when someone develops an AI agent, the actual code that generates the agent is mingled with the application code, the software code,” said. “So there’s nothing to point at and say that a specific agent took that action. We cannot trace it really.”

So the co-founders separated the agents from their implementation.

“Now, an agent can be addressable,” he explained. “We can point to them, we can trace them. We can audit them separately. That makes them also movable and portable or interoperable. So our agents work with models from chat GPT and anthropic models from Google or Gemini.”

“And this is one of the main advantages to our customers,” he added, “is that you are not married to or you are not locked in to any one of these providers.”

Because the agent is portable and not tied to the model that powers it — and the agent has its own identity — it also has its own security and policy and governance posture, Gharibi noted.

“It makes it auditable, governable,” he continued. “So we are HIPAA compliant and we are under the observation period for SOC 2 Type II, which makes us also compliant to work in FinTech domains, etc.”

Gharib Gharibi, Archia.io, second from left, stands with Amber Dunn, program manager for Wichita-based NXTUS, second from right, and fellow Kansas City founders Donnie Hampton, Roz; Zik Nwanganga and Bing Low, Ulom; during Launch Week in October 2025 in Wichita; photo courtesy of NXTUS

Kansas City connected

Before starting Archia, Gharibi — who has a PhD in computer science, specialized in secure AI systems — worked for six years at Kansas City-based TripleBlind, where he was deploying AI systems and regulated domains everywhere from the world’s top-ranked hospitals to the big four banks. He noticed over and over again one problem was preventing them taking AI systems and deploying them into production, he shared.

“It requires a lot of testing and guardrails to protect the data, especially in these regulated domains,” he explained.

When TripleBlind was later acquired, Gharibi decided to launch Archia to address that very problem. By January of this year, the co-founders released their business-to-business product. Since then, they have taken on four customers in areas like healthcare, manufacturing, and sports tech.

“Our token usage or processing — which is like the amount of AI agents our customers are using —  has increased 7x in the last three months. That illustrates how quickly customers can deploy agents.”

Now, Gharibi said they are looking to expand their customer base — and are looking to hire sales leaders — plus expand their offerings to current customers as many are looking to deploy more agents.

“I think the type of companies we are working with — the mid-market companies here in Kansas City — they value trust,” he noted. “They value seeing a local company building cutting-edge technology at the forefront here from Kansas City. They’re loving that we are able to drive to all of our customer offices.”