Andy Li

Andy Li is co-founder and CEO of Respan, an AI engineering company whose software traces, evaluates, and improves agents in production. With classmates from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign he started the company as Keywords AI, joined Y Combinator's Winter 2024 batch, and later rebuilt and renamed it around agent observability.

Designing AirPods at Apple

Li studied mechanical engineering and economics at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, then worked at Apple as a product design engineer on parts of AirPods 4. In a Pulse 2.0 interview he said he left to build full-time with friends he already trusted: "I studied mechanical engineering and economics at UIUC, where I met my co-founders and some of my closest friends." The early company lived in hacker houses in Alameda, California.

Agent Failures During Y Combinator

Keywords AI began as infrastructure for routing LLM calls across model providers. During Y Combinator, Li kept hearing from teams that shipped multi-step agents and could see quality drop or costs spike without knowing why. "The bigger problem was not routing itself," he told Pulse 2.0. "AI teams were starting to ship complex agents into production, but they had almost no visibility into how those agents behaved, why they failed, or how to improve them over time."

Respan now combines production tracing, evaluations, prompt workflows, and a gateway. In the same interview he described the longer bet: "Long term, our goal is to become the default observability and improvement layer for every team shipping AI agents in production."