Phillip Li

Phillip Li met Akira Tong in first-year calculus at UBC, according to Arga Labs' YC page. Tong was 14 at the time, and Li was studying neuroscience. Within a year of switching to computer science, Li built a dev tool at Amazon as an intern that saved 10 weeks a year of engineering hours. The two now run Arga Labs, with Li as CEO and co-founder.

Practice Systems for Agents at Arga

According to TechCrunch, Arga builds training environments for enterprise software like Salesforce, Workday and email clients. Instead of a stateless API endpoint, it builds a full digital twin of each program, with permission systems and webhooks intact.

Li's example is a prospective client creating a lead in Salesforce while a colleague reaches out separately through HubSpot. "Can the agent correctly identify that these two are the same company?" Li told TechCrunch.

Arga's General Catalyst Seed

Arga announced a $10 million seed round led by General Catalyst in August 2026, with Box Group, Emergence, Gradient and SV Angel participating. "Having a repeatable sandbox environment is very important, and much more important with agents than it was with humans," General Catalyst's Yuri Sagalov told TechCrunch.

In the four months before the raise, users ran over 100,000 tests in Arga's sandboxes, Li wrote on LinkedIn.