Tessl — AI Native Software Development — Welcome to boldstart!
At boldstart, we love to partner from Inception with technical founders reimagining the enterprise. With the GenAI platform shift, every category is up for reinvention, and in our opinion, one of the biggest opportunities is to rethink how people create and build software. To that end, we’re thrilled to partner with Guy Podjarny for a third time (Blaze — sold to Akamai, Snyk — multi-billion developer friendly security) as he’s back on a new mission to bring AI Native Software development to the world. Tessl just announced $125M of total funding including a previously unannounced $25m Inception round led by boldstart ventures and GV and a Series A led by Index with participation from Accel, GV, and boldstart.
The current state of coding assistants is impressive, but it’s merely bolting AI onto existing paradigms, much like Grammarly’s auto-complete. Imagine reimagining software development entirely from AI-first principles. In that future, you would start with a prompt and simply tell the AI what to build, rather than beginning in the IDE with code. That is Tessl’s mission.
This is certainly a big and ambitious undertaking, and our heads were certainly spinning as we broke down the possibilities earlier this year over coffee. What if developers described what they wanted and captured it in a specification (spec), and AI just did the rest. What if it took minutes or hours to build versus days or weeks. Since we start with the spec versus the code, the AI Native Dev platform is smart enough to continuously maintain the app, relying on tests from the spec to ensure it doesn’t break with any changes, and regularly apply updates for dependencies and vulnerabilities. So not only will it be easier to create new applications but also maintain and secure them 🤯!!! That sounds like a pretty awesome world where more software will be created and just take care of itself.
Back to that Sunday morning coffee — even though the idea was still pretty high level, and Guy was not 100% sure how to frame the complex problem into smaller chunks, we knew that was one of Guy’s strengths — how to simultaneously think big while building with empathy for the end user. We’ve experienced this power firsthand over 13 years, as he set out to speed up loading times on websites with Blaze (sold to Akamai), and then invent the concept of developer-friendly security with Snyk, now a multibillion-dollar company. This is also not a new idea for Guy as we’ve discussed this over the years, but the tools and AI have finally arrived (or almost) for Guy to embark on this mission. Lastly, this movement would also require a developer’s mindset through and through, and there was no better bet than partnering with Guy for a third time with boldstart’s largest initial Inception check to date of $12.5M. Since our initial check in April, Guy has already assembled a world class team and has sprinted out of the gates with an entirely new software development platform built. As per Guy:
“Creating AI Native software requires an entirely different workflow to that of its code-centric predecessor. It includes steps like: writing and editing a spec; understanding and interacting with decisions the LLM have made; reviewing and troubleshooting implementation steps by guiding the LLM; versioning adaptable software; autonomous maintenance workflows; etc. Enabling such creation calls for a new development platform, which will form and evolve alongside the paradigm. This is what we’re building at Tessl.”
If you want to sign up for the waitlist and learn more about how AI Native Software Development and spec-first creation works, visit Tessl and check out Guy’s blog post.
🙏🏼 you Guy and Tessl for letting boldstart partner with you on this mission.
And welcome again to the Boldstart family!
More on the round from TechCrunch and GuyPo.