Aditya Raj
Co-Founder at Cursus
Aditya Raj and Yash Maderna built Cursus after two years running Axiom CMA, a media agency. They were tired of switching tools to keep one decision in one place.
We're building Cursus independently, from the ground up.
Two founders, Aditya Raj and Yash Maderna. Aditya builds the core product. Yash pressure-tests every piece of it before it's allowed to exist. Everything Cursus is today came out of that back and forth.
Aditya builds the core product. Yash pressure-tests every piece of it before it is allowed to exist.
Co-Founder at Cursus
Co-Founder at Cursus
Aditya on building with Yash
I’m Aditya. Yash and I have been best friends since school, five years of trust I’ve never had to explain. He breaks, I rebuild, and neither of us means anything without the other.
Before I build anything, it goes through Yash first. Every idea I bring him gets turned over and shown from both sides, where it holds and where it breaks. Never waved through. Never shot down outright. His instinct under pressure is always the same: take the problem, however big, and cut it down to the smallest next step that’s actually within reach. He’s the mirror for the wrong things I’m about to do, the one person I go back to, stuck or not, who always finds a way through.
Whatever Yash gets working, however rough, is where I start, pulling it apart, pushing it until it’s fast, unbreakable, built to hold up past whatever it was originally built for. We built Axiom CMA™ together the exact same way.
It shaped how I approach everything — a jack of all trades, master of none, but often better than a master of one.
I’m drawn to the goal that might not work over the one that’s guaranteed to, bigger ambitions, harder paths, on purpose. Most of what I’ve actually learned came from the decisions that went wrong, not the ones that went right, and I’ve stopped pretending otherwise.
I was thirteen the first time I built something that worked, an RC car chip, a couple of motors off Amazon, wired together into a drone that flew, barely, but flew. That kid hasn’t stopped since.
Destroyer and rebuilder. The canvas only exists because we both keep showing up.
We built Cursus because we were tired of switching tools
We ran Axiom CMA™, a media agency, for two years. The work was fine. The stack was not. Chat in one tab, the plan in another, the project in a third, the files somewhere else. Both of us hit it every week — Aditya building, Yash pressure-testing — and every week we were the ones carrying the same decision between tools.
We were the founders of Axiom. If we felt it on a two-person team, a bigger team would feel it worse. Five tools, five half-pictures of the same project, and an AI in each one that only knows its own corner.
That's what Cursus is now: one workspace for a team's projects, plans, notes, files and chat, with Northstar reading across all of it. A company brain that only knows what each person is allowed to know.
We kept the part that started it. Your habits and your journal still live in Cursus, private, behind their own consent. A person is more than their job, and their company doesn't get to see the rest.
We decided not to build connectors to the tools we're replacing. Wiring five apps together keeps them five apps.
We're still young. Still learning. Cursus is still becoming, and so are we. If you've felt this problem on your own team, we want to hear how.
Three constraints came out of the break-and-rebuild cycle above: Context Is Not Optional, Built From the Inside, Whole or Not At All. We hold them even when the easier path is to drop them.
Nothing means anything on its own. A task without the reason behind it is just noise. Strip the context out of anything and what's left is busywork, technically organized, actually meaningless.
We'd rather build something slower that remembers why, than something fast that forgot.
Cursus wasn't designed for a hypothetical user. It was designed for the person building it, used daily, broken daily, rebuilt daily, long before anyone else ever saw it. If it didn't hold up under our own life, it didn't ship.
The first user was always us.
A half-built system asks people to work around its gaps. We'd rather take longer and ship something complete than release something fast that quietly asks you to compromise.
Every module exists, or it doesn't exist yet. There's no half-live version.
Aditya Raj and Yash Maderna founded Cursus. They are co-founders and best friends since school. They ran Axiom CMA, a media agency, for two years before they built Cursus. They were tired of switching tools to keep one decision in one place. They saw the same problem on bigger teams and built the workspace so the plan stays attached to the work. Cursus is built independently by Aditya and Yash. Aditya builds the core product. Yash pressure-tests every piece of the product before it is allowed to exist. This page lists their profiles, including LinkedIn, X, Wikidata, Instagram and Crunchbase. Work is shared. Journal, habits and DMs stay behind a wall the company cannot cross. Everything Cursus is today came out of that back and forth. Meet the founders. Read on.
Aditya Raj and Yash Maderna, co-founders and best friends since school.
The media agency Aditya and Yash ran for two years before they built Cursus.
They were tired of switching tools to keep one decision in one place. They saw the same problem on bigger teams.
This page lists their profiles, including LinkedIn, X, Wikidata, Instagram and Crunchbase.
Two years.
Cursus is independent. Aditya Raj and Yash Maderna built it from the ground up.
Independently. From the ground up. Break, rebuild, keep showing up.
Built for teams and agents to talk, plan and build together.