Johannesburg – HyperDev – a new AI tech company with operations in Europe and South Africa – has raised more than US$1 million (R15 million) in pre-seed funding from a network of venture capital investors from Europe, i and the UK, as the generative AI software development platform approaches 100,000 users.
“We backed HyperDev because they combine genuine AI R&D depth with a built-in distribution channel of millions of developers,” said Falk Albers, Managing Director at Reinsurance Intelligence Quotient (RIQ) & General Partner at Loom Ventures .
“While most vibe coding tools are thin wrappers around third-party LLMs, HyperDev is building proprietary technology that makes code generation actually useful.
“That combination of real tech and built-in distribution is rare at any stage – at pre-seed, it’s exceptional.”
The startup has uniquely created AI – dubbed “Guided Mode” – that helps people more efficiently and effectively use code generated by large language models themselves to ship working websites, apps, and other code solutions quickly, and also allows non-technical users to hire developers to further ship software generated by AI.
This solution is addressing the failure of the first generation of AI coding tools – they spit out code easily but this often does not result in deployable software that lands in the hands of real users.
This solution has been validated by massive growth, with the startup growing to nearly 100 000 users of their AI coding tool in less than 3 months.
“Every AI coding tool on the market was built on the assumption that generating code was the hard part,” said Piotr Sobolewski, Chief Technical Officer and Co-Founder at HyperDev.
“We built HyperDev because we knew the hard part was what came after, and nobody else seems to be solving that.”
HyperDev was built by a founding team that includes Piotr Sobolewski – previously employed by OpenAI where he contributed to the technology behind ChatGPT – and Riaz Moola – previously employed by Google where he worked on AI methods that became used in tools like Gemini.
Both Riaz & Piotr also previously carried out AI research at leading universities, specialising in AI that helps people understand and process the outputs of ‘large’ AI generative models.
“AI app builders are seeing high user churn, so retention is the metric that matters most. Since the launch of Guided Mode, we’ve seen a near doubling in the retention rate of users,” said Kenne Loubser, Chief Marketing Officer at HyperDev.
“The platforms that dominate this space were built by people who assumed developers would use AI the way a small number of well-resourced engineers use it,” said Anton Moulder, Head of Product at HyperDev.
“Most of the world’s builders do not have that safety net. We built HyperDev for them — and the growth tells us we were right.”
HyperDev is live with users across 14 countries, with users generating code using Guided AI to build a wide variety of software, including mobile apps, ecommerce stores, personal websites, fintech solutions, & edtech platforms.
HyperDev also integrates with the HyperionDev edtech platform, which offers users access to university-backed technical education to upskill themselves.
