“Greptile Secures $4M Funding to Pioneer AI-Driven Code Mastery”

Greptile, an early stage startup from a group of recent Georgia Tech grads, decided to take a different approach: using AI to help developers understand the code base. Greptile CEO and co-founder Daksh Gupta says the Greptile bot is like having a highly experienced coworker who has a deep understanding of your code. “So we’re building AI tools that understand large code bases at companies because as time goes on, and multiple programmers work on the codebase, it tends to get very difficult to understand,” Gupta told TechCrunch. Once the repositories have been indexed by the system, you add a natural language query such as, how does the authentication work in this code base,” he said. The startup launched last July after the founders came up with the idea for the company at a hackathon.

When it comes to the implementation of generative AI in developer tools, the focus has primarily been on code generation, such as with Github Copilot. However, a new startup called Greptile is taking a different approach by using AI to assist developers in understanding their code base.

What sets Greptile apart is their unique use of an API for developers to connect directly to their code base and create custom apps based on AI-driven queries. Recently, the startup announced a successful $4 million seed round to fuel their innovative approach.

“The Greptile bot is like having an experienced coworker with a deep understanding of your code,” says Daksh Gupta, CEO and co-founder of Greptile. “We’re building AI tools to comprehend large code bases, as it can become increasingly challenging to understand as multiple programmers add to it over time.”

The company launched last July after the founders came up with the idea at a hackathon. They quickly gained traction with around 100 customers paying $10-$20 a month and were accepted into Y Combinator for the Winter 24 batch.

However, even before founding Greptile, the founders had experience with enterprise feedback management chatbots while in college. They had raised enough money to move to San Francisco, but soon realized there was a significant gap in their knowledge when it came to founding a successful company.

“Initially, we made the mistake of focusing on investors rather than solving real customer needs,” Gupta recalls. “We learned the hard way that we should have been focusing on real problems that people had and solving them with technology.”

As their focus shifted, Greptile began to see success. “No one told us that what we’re doing is the purest form of capitalism,” says Gupta. “We’re creating value for people, and they’re happy to pay for the value we provide.”

Y Combinator reinforced the importance of a customer-centric approach, which has resulted in over 500 paying customers for Greptile, including individuals, teams, and organizations.

As the company continues to grow, the founders have ambitious goals. “We want to offer software teams the necessary building blocks to create custom, AI developer tools specific to their system,” says Gupta.

Greptile’s latest funding round was led by Initialized Capital, with significant contributions from prominent industry angels.