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Kombai, a company building new AI models that can understand and code UI designs like humans, raised $4.5 million in Seed funding round. It also announced the launch of its public research preview. The round was led by Stellaris Venture Partners and Foundation Capital, with angel participation from prominent CTOs and SaaS executives.
Kombai will use the funding to continue investing in research and development. Specifically, they plan to focus on accelerating improvements to their base models, building compatibility with a range of libraries and frameworks used by developer teams, and elevating the developer experience around the product.
“Over the past decade, user experience (UX) has become increasingly important for businesses of all sizes and types. As a result, user interfaces have become more and more sophisticated, leading to increased demand and complexity of frontend development. However, developers still spend a significant amount of their working time, ranging from 25% to 75%, on procedural code such as styles (CSS), DOM (HTML), and framework-specific boilerplate. These tasks are often viewed as monotonous and counterproductive by developers. Kombai enables developers to spend less time on these mundane tasks, freeing up more time to focus on coding the business logic that’s critical for modern applications,” said Dipanjan Dey, co-founder and CEO, Kombai.
According to an official statement, Kombai’s mission is to make frontend development fun again for the five million frontend and 15 million fullstack developers around the world. By simply prompting Kombai with design files, developers can get production-quality UI code with just one click per component. This code can then be easily downloaded or copied into their IDEs, modified in any way, and incorporated into their codebases, as per the company.
“Demand for frontend developers has been on a tear for the last decade with the growth of software along with the explosion of devices, frontend frameworks, and languages. Supply, on the other hand, has been woefully short. The existing landscape of frontend developer tools has been disappointing for the most part. In Kombai’s team, we discovered a rare blend of tech and product expertise needed to solve a difficult problem with a fundamentally new approach. We’re thrilled by the remarkable strides the team has taken in developing the product and the positive developer feedback,” said Alok Goyal, partner, Stellaris Venture Partners.