🦄 Unicorner Startup of the Week:

Komment

✍️ Notes from the Editors

Today’s article is brought to you by WeAreLATech. Are you building in tech in LA? Visiting SoCal and want to be plugged into the scene? Join the club.

We’re both engineers. Could you tell?

Some of us do have hobbies! But if you’re extra weird like us, you spend your weekends writing up newsletters on startups.

Now if only engineers would write up documentation the way newsletter writers write emails. The smartest engineers will probably use something like Komment, though—automate your code clarity problems away!

- Arek and Ethan 🦄

Automated code documentation

Komment is a software tool that can generate comments and documentation for enterprise code. With many different contributors and project complexities, documenting a code base is imperative for a company. Engineers often spend a lot of time context-switching and trying to comprehend code they didn’t write. Komment automates this tedious and manual process, giving engineers the bandwidth to focus strictly on development rather than documentation.

🔗 Check it out: komment.ai

💰 Business Model

Komment is very early in its life, having launched in the second half of 2023. Its pricing is variable—right now, Komment primarily charges based on the number of contributors or the number of repositories a client owns.

📈 Traction and Fundraising

• Raised $1 million in Pre-Seed funding in October 2023 led by Craft Ventures

• Customers include Prudential, 57Blocks, R Sigma, and more

👫 Founders

Adi Singh, Founder & CEO

Adi Singh, CEO of Komment, studied computer science at Stanford University. In his CS classes, there were often requirements to provide well-documented and commented code. However, the moment school was over and there wasn’t a requirement or standards around code documentation, he stopped regularly documenting his code. While working at many companies, big (Amazon) and small (various startups), he saw that documentation wasn’t always a priority. 

This came to a boiling point in 2019, when he moved to Germany to work at a startup that had code that was written in C, a more complex language, and had zero documentation. As he continued to experience this pain point, he started doing research and building a potential solution, which served as the inspiration and groundwork for Komment. As he looked for solutions, he looked into academia as well as existing solutions around the use of machine learning in code documentation.

💼 Opportunities

• Komment is a team of five employees, so while there are no formal listings, email [email protected] if you are interested in joining! Make sure to mention you came from Unicorner.

🔮 Our Analysis

Every year, nearly 100 billion lines of code are written, most of which are undocumented. This means there is a large opportunity for Komment to pursue. Komment's mission is simple: to make technical documentation seamless for organizations. Having started as a side project in 2018 and with CEO Adi Singh going full-time with it in 2023, the company is working toward making this vision a reality. 

The company predates much of the AI hype, meaning one of its biggest advantages is no third-party dependencies. Komment owns all its pipelines and infrastructure, which provides it a level of flexibility to pivot, detachment from other platform’s limitations, and ability to scale. For a company that is so early in its lifecycle and also developing in a space that is new and continuing to evolve, this will allow them to iterate efficiently. With this early momentum and a founder who understands the problem space, Komment is well-positioned to grow into a major player in code documentation software. 

Many existing large software companies may add their own automated code generation tools, while smaller startups may try to build something similar to Komment. Though the space may be crowded, there is certainly opportunity for the company. First, not everyone has the resources to build a solution as focused as Komment’s. Moreover, Komment is already off to a good start, with major enterprise customers such as Prudential. From a founder with a strong background, lack of dependence on external tools, and early traction, Komment has a real opportunity to make code documentation seamless and let developers develop.

📚 Further Reading

• Komment Blog [Medium]

Written by Matthew Huo

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