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Software documentation — the resources that excuse how software works and how to apply it — has evolve dramatically over the preceding few X . Once mostly in the soma of PDFs and motionless plaintext , MD today are more interactive and drug user - friendly than they used to be .
But crafting them is still a clip sink . Han Wang and Hahnbee Lee , both devs and entrepreneurs , say that they ’ve personally struggled with this .
“ In the 2010s , party like Stripe , HashiCorp , Twilio and a bunch others raised the legal profession on developer content , ” Wang say . “ They proved that a in truth great developer experience for their capacity is not just a good , but a competitive reward . Since then , every company has been prove to catch up , but it ’s actually quite difficult . ”
Inspired to try simplify the workflows to publish Commerce Department ( mainly to make their own lives well-off ) , Wang and Lee createdMintlify , a collection of documentation - authoring tools , include tools that can auto - generate docs from codebases .
“ In the 2020s , the bar for documentation is go up once again , ” Wang aver . “ This clip , it ’s not just with the UI , but the way developers and editors are essentially interact with the content because of AI . ”
An AI-powered vision
Wang and Lee meet in college . The two attended Cornell ; Lee was a reckoner science undergrad , and Wang was studying for a bachelor ’s in selective information science .
As a scholar , Wang ground two companies : FoodFul , a system for remotely supervise farm animal , and masses , a chopine to build client community of interests . After People ( which Lee helped found ) was acquired by user engagement house Bettermode , Wang stayed on for several months but finally left to become a partner at Bain Capital Ventures .
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Wang left Bain in 2021 , which bechance to be decent around the time he and Lee had the musical theme for Mintlify . They raisedseed capitalfrom Bain ( leverage Wang ’s connector ) and others , including Sourcegraph co - founder Quinn Slack , to grow the platform into a business .
At a high level , Mintlify help devs with writing guides , API acknowledgment , SDK docs and chatbots ( powered by OpenAI ’s API ) to excuse the IN and outs of their computer software and services . It provides build - in components and templates for basic doc data format , and structure docs so that they can be embedded in a codebase .
To aid keep doc , Mintlify also routinely scans for “ stale ” corroboration and detects how users are engage with the content to suggest ways to improve readability .
But there is some criticism of Mintlify ’s automation features .
Wang emphasizes thepotentialof the platform ’s AI over its limitations , while implying that humans ca n’t be removed from the documentation - committal to writing grummet entirely .
“ As we see it , the role of subject was exchange with AI . certification will evolve automatically in real time from support messages , the codebase and product feedback , ” Wang say . “ AI help will help caller spell technical content mechanically base on Cartesian product changes and drug user feedback . ”
An expanding business
Mintlify is n’t the only inauguration trying to revamp how devs make and bring out technical guides .
There’sGuidde , whose AI automatically yield software software documentation videos . More in line with what Mintlify ’s doing , Documatic mechanically produce changelogs and explanations from codification in summation to support .
I mentioned rivals to Wang , and he responded by spotlight Mintlify ’s rather telling customer list , which includes Anthropic , Cursor , Perplexity , Zapier , Polymarket , Fidelity and around 3,000 other brands . ( Wang estimate that Mintlify ’s tools arrive at more than 1.5 million developer a month . )
He also hinted at differentiating capableness get to the Mintlify platform in the near future .
“ Every support now need to have an AI chat to answer questions directly . But it will go much deeper into that , ” Wang say . “ Content creation will also change … The content will be used to power funding , chatbots and generative AI good example themselves . Content will also be personalized for every proofreader . ”
To make that vision a reality , Mintlify recently close an $ 18.5 million Series A funding round lead by Andreessen Horowitz with participation from Bain and Y Combinator . ( Andreessen Horowitz universal partner Jennifer Li is joining Mintlify ’s board as a part of the mass . ) This brings Mintlify ’s total lift to $ 21.7 million ; Wang state that the unexampled cash will be put toward expanding Mintlify ’s 11 - someone squad and merchandise development .
“ We have always focused on operating lean and efficiently , ” Wang say . “ We did not require to fundraise , but strategically decided to for fuel further growing . ”
Wang decline to answer questions about Mintlify ’s taxation and lucrativeness .
