Developer experience platform startup Katara AI Inc. today revealed it has closed on a $2.2 million seed funding round, and says it will use the money to expand beyond its Web3 customer base and try to target developers at legacy technology firms.
Today’s round was co-led by Diagram Ventures and Sparkle Ventures, and saw participation from StreamingFast and other angel investors. It brings Katara’s total amount raised to date to $2.6 million, following an earlier pre-seed round.
The startup has built a novel developer experience platform that integrates generative artificial intelligence, machine learning and natural language processing technologies to automate feedback and respond to developer’s queries in real-time. The idea is to streamline developer onboarding and accelerate their workflows so as to speed up their work.
Katara co-founder and Chief Executive Matthew Rossi told SiliconANGLE that his company’s platform helps DevX teams to author better content and streamline its delivery by using community platforms as a source of information.
“Katara’s Agentic Workflows can be deployed to platforms like Discord, Telegram, Slack, and do all kinds of jobs like answers questions, classify conversations into topical categories, suggest improvements to existing content, transform content from one type to another, and more,” he said. “Our goal is to bring massive efficiency to DevX teams and ultimately improve member onboarding and retainment.”
The platform uses AI agents to respond to developer’s queries, leveraging retrieval-augmented generation techniques that enable it to cite company’s specific knowledge bases and technology documentation. It explains that these agents can be configured by users to respond to even the most complex questions about their projects. Each response will cite the relevant documentation, the company adds, so developers can explore further if they need more information or there’s something they don’t understand.
The startup has already made quite an impression in the Web3 industry – a new, decentralized internet that’s built on blockchain technologies. It says that early adopters including Avail Protocol, Hivemapper Inc and Filecoin Inc. have collectively saved an average of 8,700 developer hours annually. Those savings are the direct result of its speedy responses to developer questions, Rossi said. So developers can spend more time working on code and less on looking for answers and solutions to any problems they come across.
“We can save time by automating away what have traditionally been manual jobs, such as answering repetitive questions, or transforming the same content for distribution across multiple platforms,” Rossi said. “Since our software runs 24/7, we can relieve some of the stress that comes with working in these front-line positions, too.”
Katara cites findings from the 2023 State of DevRel report that point to the need for a superior DevX platform. That study points out that the vast majority of developer teams are under-resourced and waste tons of time and resources on repetitive questions and answers. It further states that the inability for developer relations teams to deliver accurate and timely content negatively impacts developer traction, impeding project progress.
That explains why Rossi says he’s eager to expand beyond the niche Katara has carved out for itself in the Web3 industry. He belives that its platform is just as able to serve traditional developer teams in the Web2 world, noting that many of them are under pressure to deliver on enterprises’ demands for generative AI automation.
“The patterns are the same, but the differences are predominantly related to how we define communities,” Rossi said. “For a Web2 company, that community might be be restricted to employees, partners and clients only. The other difference is the platforms we will need to support. While most Web3 teams are using Discord in some way, on the Web2 side it’s usually forums like Discourse or applications like Slack.”