Kombai, a company building new AI models that can understand and code UI designs like humans, announced $4.5 million in seed funding and the launch of its public research preview. The round was led by Stellaris Venture Partners and Foundation Capital, with angel participation from prominent CTOs and SaaS executives. 

Kombai’s mission is to make frontend development fun again for the five million frontend and 15 million full-stack developers around the world. By simply prompting Kombai with design files, developers can get production-quality UI code with just one click per component. This code can then be easily downloaded or copied into their IDEs, modified in any way, and incorporated into their codebases. 

Dipanjan Dey, co-founder and CEO, said: “Over the past decade, user experience (UX) has become increasingly important for businesses of all sizes and types. As a result, user interfaces have become more and more sophisticated, leading to increased demand and complexity of front-end development. However, developers still spend a significant amount of their working time, ranging from 25 per cent to 75 per cent, on procedural code such as styles (CSS), DOM (HTML), and framework-specific boilerplate. These tasks are often viewed as monotonous and counter-productive by developers. Kombai enables developers to spend less time on these mundane tasks, freeing up more time to focus on coding the business logic that’s critical for modern applications.” 

The fund will be used to invest in research and development. Specifically, the focus is on accelerating improvements to their base models, building compatibility with a range of libraries and frameworks used by developer teams, and elevating the developer experience around the product, said the company in s statement.