Rork founders Levan Kvirkvelia and Daniel Dhawan live a life that appears like a plot for a film. However it actually occurred.
They went from broke, life financial savings spent, and in debt $15,000 apiece on bank cards — Kvirkvelia was even sleeping on a mattress at a buddy’s condo — to $100,000 of income in 5 days.
And that led to a $2.8 million seed spherical led by Andreessen Horowitz’s new Speedrun program, with different backers piling in like Hustle Fund’s Elizabeth Yin, ChapterOne, Founders Inc., Austen Allred, Expo’s Charlie Cheever, and Evan Bacon, Runway’s Siqi Chen, and extra.
All as a result of one particular person tweeted about their cellular app vibe coder product, and the tweet went viral. Rork lets folks with restricted technical backgrounds construct cellular apps with a easy textual content immediate.
On February 12, after months of labor and one pivot, Kvirkvelia and Dhawan launched Rork with a tweet.
“We had been full underdogs. We had been actually working out of cash actually quickly,” Dhawan instructed TechCrunch.
They’d gotten a small test from one angel investor, Matt Shumer, the co-founder CEO of OthersideAI, which makes AI writing software Hyperwrite.
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Their first tweet obtained handed round a bit, however it wasn’t till February 24, when folks had been tweeting a couple of competing product from an organization known as Bolt, that Shumer posted on X that he thought Rork was higher than Bolt.
“My jaw simply DROPPED,” Shumer wrote in his X post. “Rork helps you to create complete iOS apps simply by describing them! Zero. Code. Required. This adjustments all the things for app growth. Rork blows Bolt out of the water (and sure, I invested instantly after attempting it).”
Shumer additionally included a video of Rork. And the submit blew up, considered greater than 1 million instances.
Utilization of Rork immediately skyrocketed, too, however the founders had been trapped. Every of them ran up $15,000 of debt on their bank cards to maintain the app working.
“We had been paying for AI out of our personal pockets, principally, as a result of we didn’t increase a lot funding,” Dhawan mentioned. “We’re, like, virtually, out of cash. After which quarter-hour after this submit, Austen Allred invested $100,000.”
By the tip of the day of Shumer’s tweet, Founder’s Inc. and Hustle Fund’s Yin had been already prepared to take a position, whereas heat intros to different buyers and angels had been flying. “So principally it was like, $350,000 that first day. And that was actually, actually loopy.”
Out of cash
Though this appears like an on the spot success — and by some measure, it’s — it was extra like rescue from a near-death expertise for the founders.
This was their third bootstrapped startup every; they’d beforehand developed hit cellular apps starting once they had been teenagers. They’re now ages 25 (Kvirkvelia) and 27 (Dhawan).
However they’d run by a lot of the money earned by these different apps engaged on a Rork’s predecessor, a Cursor-like vibe coder geared towards nontechnical customers.
Dhawan had been in San Francisco since December to attend Founders Inc. and fundraise, working by Christmas and sleeping on a mattress at a YC founder buddy’s condo, whereas Kvirkvelia stayed residence in Georgia to construct the brand new product. Fundraising wasn’t going effectively.
Then competitor Lovable launched and went immediately viral. However their product wasn’t able to compete with Lovable. “We had the prototype completed already, after which they launched,” Dhawan remembers. “We had been actually disenchanted.”
So Kvirkvelia satisfied Dhawan that they need to change course. Reasonably than constructing one other Lovable, which tackles AI internet coding, they need to return to their roots and construct a Lovable for cellular apps.
Nobody had executed this earlier than — at the least not effectively — as a result of as laborious as internet growth is, constructing native cellular apps is “like 10 instances extra difficult,” Kvirkvelia instructed TechCrunch..
So “we’re the Lovable for Expo. The Lovable for React,” Kvirkvelia mentioned, mentioning two common cellular app growth frameworks.
Then rival startup Bolt launched a cellular vibe coding product, and the founders had deja vu, fearing they had been going to be overwhelmed out of the market once more. In order that they launched the identical day as Bolt, Dhawan mentioned.
After Shumer’s tweet went viral and angels started pouring in, one among their new angels launched the founders to Andrew Chen, the final companion working Andreessen Horowitz’s new Speedrun program. Speedrun is a16z’s 12-week mentorship program for early-stage startups. It contains issues like $5 million value credit from the agency’s companions like AWS, Google Cloud, OpenAI, Microsoft, Nvidia, Stripe, Deel, and others. It usually invests as much as $1 million, as effectively.
Chen reached out, however Dhawan didn’t soar instantly. He defined to Chen that he already had a pre-seed time period sheet in hand from one other agency. Chen, decided to not miss out, did his personal pace run at his agency and shortly delivered a competing provide. The Rork founders accepted, nabbed their seed cash, and can attend the cohort scheduled to start on July 28.
“Daniel and Levan are extremely technical polymaths who deeply perceive cellular growth and distribution, which has allowed them to construct a improbable platform shortly,” Chen instructed TechCrunch over e mail. “They’re precisely the kind of founders we’re excited to again with a16z Speedrun.”
Even higher than the funding, paying customers are pouring in. Two months after Shumer’s viral tweet, this group of two hit $550,000 ARR, Dhawan says.
And he’s off the ground and residing in his personal condo, now, too.