Grit, a startup using artificial intelligence to help companies maintain their software more efficiently, today exited stealth mode with $7 million in funding.

The funding round was co-led by Founders Fund and Abstract Ventures. More than a half-dozen other investors participated as well.

Companies periodically update their applications’ code to remove so-called technical debt. This is a term used to describe code that performs its intended task, but doesn’t do so particularly well. Technical debt can include, for example, a website interface section that loads more slowly than it should.

Software teams spend a significant portion of their work day fixing suboptimal code. New York-based Grit has developed an AI platform that promises to speed up the task. According to the startup, its platform can find technical debt in an application’s code base and generate new, more efficient code with which it can be replaced.

One task Grit promises to speed up is the process of fixing slow application components.

Many applications written in the JavaScript programming language are made up of code snippets known as classes. To make their software speedier, some companies are replacing classes with a new, faster type of code structure called a functional component. Grit says its AI can automatically turn JavaScript classes into functional components.

The company’s platform also promises to speed up dependency upgrades. A dependency is a third-party code component, such as an open-source library, that developers have built into their application. Grit can speed up tasks such as upgrading a third-party component to the latest version or replacing it with another open-source module.

It promises to simplify more complicated code upgrades as well. According to the company, its AI can help software teams change the programming language in which an application component is written.

One reason a company might switch programming languages is to ease its developers’ work. JavaScript applications, for example, are sometimes rewritten in TypeScript, a programming language that’s considered easier to read and maintain. TypeScript is an enhanced version of JavaScript that was released by Microsoft Corp. in 2012.

“Our software can push around and modify code at scale,” Grit founder and Chief Executive Officer Morgante Pell wrote in a blog post today. “We allow developers to express a high-level goal, such as splitting a monolith into microservices, upgrading from AngularJS to Angular 15, or converting a codebase from JavaScript to TypeScript, while delegating the implementation details to AI agents.”

Grit’s platform is available to users in the U.S. through an open beta program. The company says its platform is already used by multiple customers, including a number of publicly traded companies.

Currently, Grit’s platform works with five programming languages and scripting syntaxes: JavaScript, TypeScript, Python, CSS and Terraform. Following today’s funding round, the company plans to add support for every major programming language not yet on the list. It expects to complete the undertaking by the end of the year. 

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