Stepsize AI
Editor-first issue tracker and AI-powered updates for software teams
- $10M
- Raised
- 15
- Teammates
- 9
- Years Building
In 2013, I moved to London to live with my brother Nick and our friends Jared and Matt. We spent every evening, night, and weekend building software together out of our hacker house. One night in 2015, we prototyped an RNN that could generate code. It was rough, but it showed us something nobody else could see yet: one day, AI would build software for humans. We wouldn't be writing code anymore.
We were so pumped by that insight that we quit our startup jobs and moved into the chef's quarters of Jared's parents' Chinese restaurant in Hastings. Free rent in exchange for help in the kitchen (really it was just Jared doing the helping). That's where Stepsize started. The pitch? Natural language would become the ultimate programming language. You'd describe what you want, and AI would build it. People thought we were nuts.
A walkthrough of Stepsize AI's editor integration and AI-powered status updates.
What We Built
We built an issue tracker that lived inside the code editor, integrated with GitHub, Linear, Jira, and the tools developers already used. The thesis: by living where developers worked, we could build a dataset of contextualised code that AI would need to truly understand and write software.
Then we layered on AI-powered status updates that could summarize what a team had been shipping, automatically. Teams at Snyk, Amazon, and Sainsbury's picked it up because they were tired of bouncing between their editor and project management tools.
Our vision was right, but our plan was wrong. We thought AI needed our proprietary data to understand code. Turns out, attention is all you need.
How It Played Out
We raised $10M from Stride, Index Ventures, Richard Branson, and Techstars. Built the team to 15 people. After nine years of building, Stepsize was acquired by ClickUp. It wasn't a straight line. There were moments I thought we'd run out of money, moments I questioned everything. But the thesis held. And that future we pitched from the chef's quarters of a Chinese restaurant? It's here.
- Investors
- Stride · Index Ventures · Richard Branson · Techstars · And many more
- Customers
- Snyk · Amazon · Sainsbury's · And many more
- Tech Stack
- VS Code Extension · TypeScript · Node.js · React
Product Screenshots
Watch me build it, mistakes included
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Already convinced?Subscribe on Substack- 01What I shipped, and what it actually took.
- 02The tools and workflows earning their keep right now.
- 03Where I got stuck, and the things that failed.