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A San Francisco startup wants to make artificial intelligence development as easy as writing in a word processor. Wordware announced today a $30 million seed round led by Spark Capital, marking one of Y Combinator’s largest initial investments to date.
The company has built what it calls a full-stack operating system for AI development, enabling users to create sophisticated AI agents using natural language instead of traditional programming code. With hundreds of thousands of users already on its platform, including enterprise customers like Instacart and Runway, Wordware is betting that the future of AI development belongs to domain experts rather than traditional software engineers.
How natural language could replace traditional programming for AI
“We are not a code-gen application,” Filip Kozera, co-founder and CEO of Wordware, told VentureBeat, distinguishing his company’s approach from other no-code tools. “We believe we’re witnessing a paradigm shift, and AI agents represent a new kind of software. Rather than focusing on code-gen, we’ve chosen to prioritize AI agents because we believe they will play a central role in driving the economy and automation in the future.”
The company’s emergence comes at a critical moment in enterprise technology. Current workplace statistics suggest that 81% of workers spend less than 3 hours daily on creative work, with inefficiencies in meaningful work costing the global economy $8.9 trillion annually. Traditional AI development requires scarce and expensive engineering talent, creating a bottleneck for companies trying to implement AI solutions.
Kozera draws an ambitious parallel to Microsoft Excel’s impact on data analytics: “Excel has 750 million monthly active users. What they’ve done to data analytics back in the 80s, we are trying to do to AI.”
Why enterprise leaders are building AI without engineering teams
The platform is already seeing adoption from major companies. “The C-suite executive comes in, spends couple days iterating on their AI agent, and then outputs an API and puts it into production,” Kozera explained. He cites an example where an Instacart founder “locked himself in his office and produced a new feature for their app” in just four days without hiring AI engineers.
Another customer, Metadata, uses Wordware to build AI systems that optimize advertising spend. Kozera described how their AI agent works: “The agent takes a query from the customer …