Rourke’s founders, Levan Kwirkberia and Daniel Dhawan, live a life that sounds like a film plot, but it actually happened.
They had been sleeping on a mattress in a friend’s apartment, with their depleted life savings and $15,000 broken in credit card debt, and within five days Durwan had generated $100,000 in revenue.
And that led to a $2.8 million seed round led by Andreesen Horowitz’s new Speedrun program, and other backers quickly piled up, like the shadow of the hustle fund Elizabeth. ChapterOne; Founders Inc. ;Austin All Red; Charlie Cheever and Evan Bacon from Expo. Siqi Chen from Runway; More.
One person tweeted about the Vibe Coder mobile app, and the tweet went viral. Rork allows people with limited technical backgrounds to build mobile apps with simple text prompts.
On February 12th, after several months of work and one pivot, Kvirkvelia and Dhawan launched Rork in a tweet.
“We were totally underdogs. We really quickly had a shortage of money,” Dhawan told TechCrunch.
They received a small check from Matt Shumer, one angel investor who is co-founder and CEO of other IDEAIs who create AI Writing Tool HyperWrite.
TechCrunch Events
Berkeley, California
|
June 5th
Book now
Their first tweet was handed over a bit, but it wasn’t until February 24th that people were tweeting about a competing product from a company called Bolt that Schumer posted to X, which Rourke thought was better than Bolt.
“My chin just fell,” Schumer wrote in his X-Post. “In Rork, you can create an entire iOS app. Zero. Code. You need it. This changes everything for app development. Rork blows the bolts out of the water (and yes, I invested right after trying it).”
Schumer, including a video of Rourke, exploded with posts, earning over a million views.
Rourke’s use also quickly spiked, but founders were financially locked in. Each had $15,000 in debt on their credit cards and kept the app running.
“Essentially, we didn’t raise much funding, so we were paying for AI from our pocket,” Dhawan said. “We’ve got little money. And 15 minutes after this post, Austin Allred invested $100,000.”
By the end of Shumer’s tweet day, Yin and Yang from Founder’s Inc. and Hustle Fund were ready to invest, but the warm intros of other investors and angels were flying. “So it was basically like $350,000 on that first day. It was really, really crazy.”
From money
This sounds like an immediate success, but with some measures, it is – it was like rescue from near-death experiences for the founder.
This was the third bootstrap startup for each. They had previously developed hit mobile apps starting from teens. He is currently 25 years old (Kvirkvelia) and 27 years old (Dhawan).
But they were running a lot of cash acquired by Rourke’s predecessors, other apps.
Dhawan has been in San Francisco since December to attend fundraising with Founders Inc. Funding wasn’t working.
Competitors then launched Lovable, which quickly went viral. However, Rourke’s products were not ready to compete with the lovable ones. “We’ve already completed the prototype and then they launched,” recalls Dhawan. “We were really disappointed.”
So Kvirkvelia convinced Dhawan that he should change courses. Rather than building another lovable thing to work on AI web coding, you need to go back to your roots and build lovable things to your mobile app.
No one has done this before because it’s as difficult as web development. This is because building a native mobile app will be “10 times more complicated,” Kvirkvelia told TechCrunch.
“We are loved by the expo. We are obsessed with the reaction,” says Kvirkvelia, referring to two popular mobile app development frameworks.
Afterwards, rival startup Bolt launched a mobile vibe coding product, and the founder had déjà vu and feared they would be beaten from the market again. So they launched on the same day as Bolt, Dhawan said.
Schumer’s tweet went viral and the angels began pouring, one of the new angels introduced Andrew Chen to the founder. Speedrun is A16Z’s 12-week mentorship program for early-stage startups. This includes $5 million worth of credits from partners in companies such as AWS, Google Cloud, Openai, Microsoft, Nvidia, Stripe, and Deel. Typically, you’ll invest up to $1 million.
Chen reached out to him, but Dhawan didn’t jump right away. He explains to Chen that he already had the previous term seat from another company in his hand. Determined not to overlook, Chen ran his own speed run in his company, quickly offering competing offers. The founders of Rourke will accept, grab the seed money and attend a cohort scheduled to begin on July 28th.
“Daniel and Levan are very technical polymers with a deep understanding of mobile development and distribution, and were able to quickly build a great platform,” Chen told TechCrunch via email. “They are exactly the type of founders who are excited to return with A16Z Speedrun.”
Dhawan said it’s better than fundraising two months after Shumer’s viral tweet, two months after Shumer’s viral tweet, and two months after Shumer’s viral tweet.
And now he’s off the floor and lives in his own apartment.
Note: This story was updated to clarify that Dhawan, not Kvirkvelia, is someone sleeping on a mattress on the floor.
Source link
