Before he was pitching a16z scouts on AI animation, Viren Tellis ran a Quiznos. Not metaphorically. An actual sandwich franchise in his early twenties, opened alongside grad school because apparently a joint JD-MBA from Northwestern wasn't enough to fill the schedule. The recession ate it by 2008. He folded the franchise and kept moving. That detail matters - not because failure is romantic, but because Tellis is the kind of person who treats dead ends as rerouting instructions rather than conclusions.
Today he is the Co-Founder and CEO of Uthana, a Los Angeles-based startup building generative AI infrastructure for 3D character animation. In March 2025, the company closed a $4.3 million seed round led by IA Ventures, with Andreessen Horowitz's speedrun program among the investors. The pitch is specific: indie game studios and mid-sized animation houses shouldn't need the budget of a blockbuster title to produce motion that looks like one. Uthana wants to close that gap entirely.
He is also, simultaneously, a Scout at a16z speedrun - Andreessen Horowitz's early-stage startup accelerator. He was part of the inaugural SR001 cohort in 2023, the same program that later backed Uthana. The symmetry is not accidental. This is what founder networks look like when they work: you come in as a company, you stay as a scout, you bring the next wave in behind you.
The arc from Cornerstone Research - where Tellis started his career providing economic analysis for litigation - through AppNexus, through Hedado, to Uthana is not random. It's iterative. Each stop is a compression algorithm on the one before it: more ownership, more technical ambition, smaller team, bigger bet.
At AppNexus (now AT&T's Xandr), he rose to Vice President of Product Management and oversaw the $2 billion programmatic advertising marketplace. He also ran global business operations before the company's acquisition. That's the kind of seat where you see at scale what it means to build a platform: the infrastructure choices that compound, the API design that haunts you three years later, the product decisions that seem minor until they don't. He learned that deeply before betting his own capital and time on something new.
Then came Hedado. The story is worth telling because it's the kind of origin that makes sense only in retrospect. During the pandemic, Tellis looked at his own charitable giving and realized he had no clean way to track where the money went, compare year-over-year giving, or discover smaller organizations doing real work. He asked around. The problem was universal. So he built a platform for it - a tool for what he called "middle-tier donors," people earning $100,000 to $500,000 annually who want to give strategically but lack institutional resources. The mission: route philanthropy toward organizations making meaningful impact rather than ones with the largest marketing budgets.
"The key to success is having conviction in yourself and the idea you're working on for the long-term."
Viren Tellis
Hedado was not the hockey-stick venture play. It was the conviction play - the one you build because the problem is real and you're positioned to address it. Tellis has spoken openly about the role of failure, describing it not as something to overcome but as material, the stuff that "provides meaningful experiences in your life." That's not a motivational poster. It's a methodology. Someone who opened a sandwich shop before the 2008 recession and kept going has earned the right to say so.
The problem Uthana is solving is deceptively specific: most 3D character animation still requires expensive motion capture studios, specialist animators, and weeks of production time. The result is a gap between what indie studios can afford and what audiences now expect. AAA game developers - the Rockstars and Ubisoils of the world - spend millions on motion fidelity. Everyone else guesses.
Uthana's technology stack includes Text-to-Motion (TTM) and Video-to-Motion (VTM) pipelines. Input a text description or a video clip and get back animation data you can drop directly into Unreal Engine, Unity, Maya, or Blender. The system is rig-agnostic - it doesn't care what character skeleton you're using - and the motion library includes finger-level data, which is where most generative animation tools cut corners.
Uthana at a Glance
The round came together with IA Ventures leading, and support from A16Z Speedrun, Acequia Capital, Cursor Capital, HustleFund, MetaVision, and JonesTrauber. That Andreessen Horowitz's accelerator put money in is notable - it means the firm saw Uthana come through the speedrun program and decided the graduation present should include a check. Tellis co-founded the company with Kethan Tellis, suggesting a family-linked founding dynamic, though the technical split between the co-founders has not been detailed publicly.
By March 2025, Uthana had launched Open Beta. The target is clear: give independent studios and mid-sized developers the motion capabilities that previously required a full production house. The tagline that does not appear on their website but probably should: AAA animation, indie budget.
The a16z speedrun role runs in parallel. As a Scout, Tellis sources early-stage deals for Andreessen Horowitz's most competitive accelerator program - a role that typically involves writing checks of $10,000 to $25,000 per deal and doing up to eight investments per year. The network is real: speedrun scouts are embedded in founder communities, often founders themselves, with an eye for the thing that looks weird until it doesn't.
His email address is vtellis@a16z.com. That combination - sitting inside one of the world's most watched venture firms while running your own startup - is unusual. It means Tellis is simultaneously deal-sourcing and company-building, operating at two speeds at once. The skill transfer runs both directions: what he sees in other early-stage companies shapes how he runs Uthana, and what he knows from building Uthana makes him a more useful scout.
Tellis holds a BS in Business from USC and a joint JD-MBA from Northwestern's Pritzker School of Law and Kellogg School of Management. He lives in Los Angeles with his family and two kids. He is not, as far as public record shows, practicing law - but the legal training shows up in how he structures arguments. Precise language. Clear thesis. Willingness to say "the mission is to beat a visual Turing test" rather than something vague about "disrupting animation."
The Quiznos detail keeps coming back not because it's funny (though it is) but because it captures the essential Tellis move: enter a domain, learn the operating logic from the inside, apply it to something more ambitious. Franchise management at 20 teaches inventory, customer behavior, and the specific pain of running a business when the macro environment goes wrong. AppNexus taught platform architecture and scale. Hedado taught mission-led product and nonprofit economics. Uthana is the synthesis.
"Failure provides meaningful experiences in your life."
Viren Tellis
There's also the philanthropy thread. While Hedado was his charitable giving startup, Tellis and his partner have also been documented welcoming Afghan refugee families into their home. The connection between believing philanthropy should be smarter and actually acting on it - opening your home rather than writing a check - is the kind of alignment between stated values and lived behavior that doesn't show up on a pitch deck.