Announcing Our Series A for AI Native Software Development
Today is an exciting day at Tessl: we’re announcing $125M in funding, including an April $25M seed round led by boldstart and GV, and a new $100M Series A led by Index with participation from Accel. We’re happy to be well-fueled for the big journey ahead, and humbled by this vote of confidence in our mission and team.
Software powers our digital world, and improving the tools we use to create it can have exponential effects. AI dev assistants offer immediate productivity gains, so it’s no surprise that they’re getting widely adopted. However, at Tessl, we look to a future beyond these incremental improvements. We believe unlocking AI’s true potential for developers means rethinking software creation from first principles.
Right now software development revolves around code – writing, editing, reviewing, testing, merging, packaging, versioning, and observing… code. Code is the source of truth for the application, and it couples what the app does with how it does it, mixed into the very same lines and increasingly entangled as the application matures. Knowing what the app should do requires user and business knowledge, while implementing the how requires technical coding skills. This coupling makes apps slow and expensive to create, as well as risky and fragile to change. It also means maintenance is a never ending grind, often taking up the majority of an engineering org’s time.
AI offers a breakthrough: finally separating what the software does from how it does it. Large Language Models (LLMs) let us explain requirements in natural language, making it easier than ever to describe what you want to build and filling in gaps as needed. On top of that, they enable machines to handle how to implement those ideas in code, complete with an understanding of both the technical context and the intent behind new features. By combining this ease of specification (‘spec’) with AI-powered implementation, we can imagine a new way to create software.
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