Software documentation — the assets that designate how software program works and the best way to use it — has developed dramatically over the previous few many years. Once largely within the type of PDFs and static plaintext, docs at this time are extra interactive and user-friendly than they was once.
But crafting them remains to be a time sink. Han Wang and Hahnbee Lee, each devs and entrepreneurs, say that they’ve personally struggled with this.
“In the 2010s, corporations like Stripe, HashiCorp, Twilio and a bunch others raised the bar on developer content material,” Wang stated. “They proved {that a} really nice developer expertise for his or her content material is not only a commodity, however a aggressive benefit. Since then, each firm has been attempting to catch up, nevertheless it’s really fairly troublesome.”
Inspired to strive simplifying the workflows to publish docs (primarily to make their very own lives simpler), Wang and Lee created Mintlify, a set of documentation-authoring instruments, together with instruments that may auto-generate docs from codebases.
“In the 2020s, the bar for documentation is rising as soon as once more,” Wang stated. “This time, it’s not simply with the UI, however the best way builders and editors are essentially interacting with the content material due to AI.”
An AI-powered imaginative and prescient
Wang and Lee met in faculty. The two attended Cornell; Lee was a pc science undergrad, and Wang was learning for a bachelor’s in data science.
As a pupil, Wang based two corporations: FoodFul, a system for remotely monitoring livestock, and People, a platform to construct buyer communities. After People (which Lee helped discovered) was acquired by person engagement agency Bettermode, Wang stayed on for a number of months however ultimately left to grow to be a accomplice at Bain Capital Ventures.
Wang left Bain in 2021, which occurred to be proper across the time he and Lee had the concept for Mintlify. They raised seed capital from Bain (leveraging Wang’s connections) and others, together with Sourcegraph co-founder Quinn Slack, to develop the platform right into a enterprise.
At a excessive stage, Mintlify assists devs with writing guides, API references, SDK docs and chatbots (powered by OpenAI’s API) to elucidate the ins and outs of their software program and companies. It gives built-in elements and templates for fundamental doc formatting, and buildings docs in order that they are often embedded in a codebase.
To assist preserve docs, Mintlify additionally routinely scans for “stale” documentation and detects how customers are partaking with the content material to recommend methods to enhance readability.
But there’s some criticism of Mintlify’s automation options.
An early person, DevClass’ Tim Anderson, claims Mintlify provides feedback to codebases which are of “little worth,” and in a single occasion repeated the identical factually unsuitable sentence in a doc 4 occasions over. Others have identified that Mintlify might be confused by disorganized and unoptimized, or in any other case poorly written, code.
Wang emphasizes the potential of the platform’s AI over its limitations, whereas implying that people can’t be faraway from the documentation-writing loop totally.
“As we noticed it, the function of content material was altering with AI. Documentation will evolve routinely in actual time from help messages, the codebase and product suggestions,” Wang stated. “AI help will assist corporations write technical content material routinely based mostly on product adjustments and person suggestions.”
An increasing enterprise
Mintlify isn’t the one startup attempting to revamp how devs make and publish technical guides.
There’s Guidde, whose AI routinely generates software program documentation movies. More consistent with what Mintlify’s doing, Documatic routinely produces changelogs and explanations from code along with documentation.
I discussed rivals to Wang, and he responded by highlighting Mintlify’s quite spectacular buyer record, which incorporates Anthropic, Cursor, Perplexity, Zapier, Polymarket, Fidelity and round 3,000 different manufacturers. (Wang estimates that Mintlify’s instruments attain greater than 1.5 million builders a month.)
He additionally hinted at differentiating capabilities coming to the Mintlify platform within the close to future.
“Every documentation now must have an AI chat to reply questions immediately. But it is going to go a lot deeper into that,” Wang stated. “Content creation may also change … The content material will likely be used to energy help, chatbots and generative AI fashions themselves. Content may also be personalised for each reader.”
To make that imaginative and prescient a actuality, Mintlify just lately closed an $18.5 million Series A funding spherical led by Andreessen Horowitz with participation from Bain and Y Combinator. (Andreessen Horowitz common accomplice Jennifer Li is becoming a member of Mintlify’s board as part of the deal.) This brings Mintlify’s complete raised to $21.7 million; Wang says that the brand new money will likely be put towards increasing Mintlify’s 11-person workforce and product improvement.
“We have all the time targeted on working lean and effectively,” Wang stated. “We didn’t must fundraise, however strategically determined to with the intention to gasoline additional progress.”
Wang declined to reply questions on Mintlify’s income and profitability.
