Happy Women’s History Month! Throughout the month of March, we’ll be featuring Q&As with a few of the inspiring female founders in our portfolio. In this series, you’ll hear firsthand about their entrepreneurial journeys – the challenges, the wins, and the lessons learned along the way. This week, we’re thrilled to share this Q&A between Ana and Sneha Sivakumar, the Founder and CEO of Spur.
When I met Sneha in late 2024, her dedication to improving engineers’ lives immediately stood out. She put it simply: “No one likes doing QA testing. If we can automate it away, engineers can focus on work that’s more meaningful and exciting.” That mindset — building not for personal recognition but to truly serve end-users — defines the kind of founder I admire most. Over the past several months, it’s been a privilege to work alongside her, and I have no doubt that she and her team will continue to transform the world of QA testing in profound ways. It’s a joy to spotlight her in this convo.
Can you tell me a little bit about your journey to becoming an entrepreneur?
My college years were split between two worlds that unexpectedly prepared me for founding Spur. In the Yale NLP lab, I spent countless late nights working on web navigation and browser agents—not because I was thinking about starting a company, but because I was genuinely fascinated by the problems. The research wasn’t always glamorous (there were plenty of failed experiments and debugging sessions), but it gave me deep technical roots that I still rely on today.
Meanwhile, my venture partner role at Pear happened almost by accident. What started as curiosity about startups turned into real work alongside partners, sitting in on pitches and seeing both the brilliant ideas and the obvious flops. I remember being struck by how different the venture world was from academia—faster-paced, more intuitive, sometimes messy.
Looking back, I never planned this combination, but it’s exactly what I needed. The lab taught me how to build, while Pear showed me how to think about what’s worth building.
What’s a big or surprising lesson you’ve learned as a woman in tech? What advice do you have for women in their professional journeys as entrepreneurs?
I’ve discovered that confidence is the cornerstone of success across every aspect of building a company. Whether it’s fundraising, sales, hiring, or recruiting, you must carry unwavering self-belief with you throughout the journey. This is something I’m constantly working on and remain deeply conscious about developing.
What makes this especially challenging is navigating industries that remain antiquated and haven’t embraced technological innovation. When you’re introducing cutting-edge solutions to sectors that aren’t on the forefront of tech, you’re essentially charting unexplored territory. The resistance to change can be palpable, and without rock-solid confidence, it’s easy to be dismissed or overlooked.
My advice would definitely be to go for things, not hold back. Definitely work on building self confidence and belief – it goes a long way.
Have you had any unexpected champions or mentors along the way? How did they support you?
My parents have been my biggest champions in ways that perfectly reflect their personalities. My mother, with her engineering background, has been an incredible behind-the-scenes support—offering technical insights during those late-night challenges across time zones and quietly helping shape aspects of Spur that few would ever know came from her brilliant mind. There’s something powerful about having someone who understands both you and the technical complexities you’re facing.
Meanwhile, my dad has mastered the art of startup founder therapy. He’s perfected the balance between motivational speeches when I need encouragement and his signature “are you eating actual food?” check-ins. Our calls often transform from business crisis management to him gently suggesting that perhaps sleeping more than four hours might improve my decision-making.
What’s one myth about entrepreneurship (or fundraising) that you’d love to debunk?
Entrepreneurship is only for people who are insanely intelligent and at the highest IQ levels. I’d say startups today, being successful (especially as a CEO) is about so much more than having a high IQ, in fact the things that matter most are mental strength, resilience and self-awareness.
This became crystal clear during our YC days when Anushka and I found ourselves in a rhythm that sounds crazy looking back. We’d be up until 1 AM working through product challenges, only to set alarms for 4 AM to catch our potential customers in India during their business hours. There was this one week where we did this five days in a row—I remember us sitting cross-legged on the couch, still in pajamas, sharing a pot of coffee while taking turns presenting our screens.
In fact, just last week we were up at 5am monitoring the scheduled test runs for a big customer we were piloting with.
What do you think needs to change in the startup ecosystem to better support women founders?
I would say the startup ecosystem today is very supportive. What we need is definitely just more women founders, which I can totally see increasing with time. The more successful female founders we see, this would be the biggest benefit for other founders to look up to and be inspired by. Ultimately, while building a startup, you are your own support system, and knowing how to create one for yourself is key.
Having a female co-founder has been invaluable in this journey. Anushka and I have created something special beyond just building a company together—we’ve formed a partnership where we instinctively understand each other’s challenges in a way others might not. There are moments when we don’t even need to explain the weight we’re carrying; we just recognize it in each other and step up. Whether it’s taking over a challenging client call when one of us is running on empty, or providing that silent reassurance during tough investor meetings, we’ve built this unspoken language that’s become our secret strength.
What’s next for Spur and why are you excited about your space and your team?
We are seeing a massive shift in the industry where every organization is looking for and seeking out AI: Spur is automating QA, a majorly antiquated space, and is very well positioned to capture this demand and drive immense value for companies.
What truly matters is our solution to the ownership problem. Many of our customers run lean engineering teams maintaining complex legacy systems. Traditionally, they faced an impossible choice: outsource QA (creating bottlenecks) or rush releases with minimal testing. Spur enables these teams to own quality directly—making sophisticated testing accessible even with outdated systems and limited resources. By aligning quality responsibility with those who know the product best, we eliminate the costly translation layer.
Just seeing how much value we are able to create is what we are extremely excited about. For example, we cut down the release cycles for some of our customers from days to just hours, and for some companies making automation a real possibility.
This year, we are in growth mode, and really focused on moving fast, tactically and executing quickly while delighting all our customers. 
Thank you, Sneha! As Women’s History Month continues, we look forward to sharing more stories from our incredible female founders and celebrating their achievements in building category-defining companies.