Fondo · Feb 2026
Fondo covered Lotas’s launch, describing Rao as an RStudio fork with an embedded AI assistant and noting the founders’ Harvard background, the RStudio user base, and the company’s data-science focus.
Company research
Public company, workplace, funding, and market signals
Updated Jul 29, 2026
Overview
Lotas is a San Francisco-based, YC Summer 2025 company building secure AI-native tools for data science. Its earlier product, Rao, brought a Cursor-like AI assistant into RStudio; its newer emphasis is Erdos, an open-source AI IDE for Python/R/Julia/SQL workflows.
Primary product
Erdos, an open-source secure AI IDE for data science; earlier product Rao is an AI coding assistant for RStudio.
Founded
2025
Headquarters
San Francisco, California, United States
Team size
1-10
Industry
Software Development
Sub-industry
Data Science and Machine Learning Platforms
Business model
open-source software
Open Positions
0 jobs at Lotas
No open positions
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