Pune’s Kombai raises $4.5M to simplify UI coding with AI

Kombai, a startup that aims to help front-end developers easily convert UI designs to code using AI, has emerged from stealth and announced a $4.5 million in a seed funding round led by Stellaris Venture Partners and Foundation Capital.

Kombai plans to utilize some of its funding to start inbound and to continue investing in research and development, improve its base models and build compatibility with a range of libraries and frameworks used by developer teams.

As technology hardware gets better and faster, there’s a growing demand for better user interfaces in software. Startups and big tech companies alike want to create standout user interfaces. However, front-end developers often find the swift coding of these unique designs challenging. Kombai’s AI model, aimed at addressing this issue, is scheduled for public research release this Wednesday.

Dipanjan Dey, CEO of Kombai told:

The model tries to develop an intuitive understanding of the design . . . and then it starts generating the code. The model could potentially be easily integrated with other design tools, including Adobe XD.

The Palo Alto–incorporated startup, which operates from an office in India’s Pune, was founded by former Mindtickle executives Dipanjan Dey (serving as Kombai CEO) and Abhijit Bhole (CTO) in April 2022 — after over 16 months of groundwork. It uses a collection of deep learning and heuristics models, each designed to tackle a specific aspect of interpreting UI designs and generating code from said interpretation.

Alok Goyal, partner at Stellaris Venture Partners said:

In Kombai’s team, we discovered a rare blend of tech and product expertise needed to solve the problem with a fundamentally new approach. We’re thrilled by the remarkable strides the team has taken in developing the product and the positive developer feedback

While Ashu Garg, partner at Foundation Capital said:

Excellent designer tools like Figma and Adobe XD have emerged in the last decade. But they do not generate meaningful code that can be used by developers. On the other hand, LLM-based tools like ChatGPT and GitHub Copilot are great for generating code suggestions from textual inputs, but they don’t work for UI development. As a result, developers need to manually translate all parts of a UI design into code, which is frustrating and incredibly time-consuming. We believe this presents a huge opportunity that has practically been begging for a solution. That’s why we’re thrilled to partner with the Kombai team in their mission of enabling the world’s 20 million developers to spend more of their time on hard, interesting problems, not mundane CSS

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