In its second seed-stage fundraising round, Northstar Ventures, a private equity firm supported by TPG Capital, raised $4.25 million for Locofy.ai, a front-end development acceleration platform that employs artificial intelligence to translate drawings into code.
According to a statement from the business, further participating investors included Golden Gate Ventures, Accel in India, Aviondor Group, as well as founders and technology directors from other firms.
Arash Ferdowsi, the co-founder and CTO of Dropbox; Nattu Adnan, the co-founder and CTO of Lottiefiles; and executives from companies like Tinder, Zopim, Paysense, and Betterhalf.ai participated in the round as individual investors.
The Singapore-based firm, which has staff members in Pakistan, India, the Philippines, Vietnam, and Canada, translates web and mobile app designs into a variety of front-end coding languages, saving front-end and full-stack developers hundreds of hours of tedious work.
It gained notoriety in 2022 when it opened a $3 million investment round and debuted its beta in January. It has thus far been able to raise a total of $7.3 million.
About 110,000 engineers and designers from 195 different countries have signed up for locofy.ai at startups, businesses, freelancers, and student groups.
It presently uses AI to translate designs created in Figma and Adobe XD into React, React Native, HTML-CSS, Gatsby, and Next. js code.
According to a statement from Locofy.ai, the additional funding will accelerate efforts to use AI to greatly simplify the design-to-code conversion process while expanding platform interfaces to more easily accommodate workflows.
The platform now integrates with Storybook, Github, Netlify, Vercel, and Snack, and hopes to expand these collaborations in the future.
The company also revealed a number of senior-level appointments in addition to fundraising.
Tien Nguyen, a former CTO at Teko and Wego, will become the vice president of engineering at Locofy.ai. Both Nguyen Kien, a former director of engineering at Tiki, and Nick Jachowski, a former founder of Swat and an AI advisor to startups, are expected to join as heads of AI and engineering, respectively.
The product from Locofy.ai is entirely free to use for now, and the company’s founders are still developing their ideas for how to monetize it. The two founders, Honey Mittal and Sohaib Muhammad are first-generation immigrants from Pakistan and India, respectively, to Singapore.
At the flight search and booking website Wego, Mittal, and Muhammad previously collaborated.
In an interview with ET, Locofy.ai’s founder and CEO Mittal said, “For us, it’s really word of mouth, community-based growth.” No outbound is done by us. No client has ever requested a demo from us. Users access the platform and use it themselves; everything is self-service. We produce a lot of documentation and information. We have a Slack community where users may ask questions and connect with the founding team, he said.
We are not replacing front-end engineers, the company’s founder and CTO, Muhammad, emphasized. They will now possess superpowers. They are receiving tools from us so they can construct more quickly. Instead of using three engineers to design the front end, one will be used.
