Fractl Inc., developer of a programming language for building generative artificial intelligence applications, today said it has raised $1.025 million in a pre-seed funding round and released its namesake language under an open-source license.

The company also announced the limited availability of a programming platform for software-as-a-service development that it said is 10 times more cost-efficient than standard cloud-native tools.

The company said the Fractl language is based on business-level abstraction, which makes it better-suited for AI-powered code generation than traditional languages such as JavaScript and Python. The language uses declarative abstraction, a programming concept that expresses the logic of a computation without explicitly defining its control flow, to reduce complexity and allow developers to focus on business outcomes. Fractl claims a few hundred lines of code written in its language can achieve the same results as tens of thousands of lines of code in more mainstream languages.

“Developers live at a very low level of abstraction with traditional programming languages where they have to tell the computer what to do and how to do it in lots of detail,” said Chief Executive Ranga Rao. “Human beings think in natural language. We are trying to raise the abstraction to allow programming to be closer to natural language. It’s drawing what a system should do on a whiteboard instead of specifying the low-level details.”

No-code with generative AI built-in

The company’s commercial product, Fractl Design Studio, combines traditional coding and no-code drag-and-drop software development with natural language prompts and an integrated copilot (pictured). Developers can generate the framework for an application using generative AI prompts furnished through OpenAI LP’s application program interface and customize it in the design studio or within the code itself. The code is then compiled into Java byte code that runs on a Java virtual machine.

“It makes it easy for your mental state to reside in the business domain and not be context-switching to technical aspects of developing the program,” Rao said. “We are building a lot of visual tools because the programming abstraction is so high. But the most important efficiency comes from leveraging generative AI at every step of development to generate and evolve the application.”

The code is fully compatible with Clojure, which is a language that’s popular in the Java community. “If you have an investment in Clojure and Java libraries, you absolutely don’t have to give up on them,” Rao said. “You can leverage Fractl to build applications using those libraries.”

With the Fractl language released to open source, Fractl.io expects to make money through its Design Studio and Fractl.io Cloud, a secure, multitenant DevOps platform for launching and managing applications built in Fractl.

WestWave Capital LLC led the funding round with participation from January Capital Pty Ltd. and Arka Venture Labs Fund LP.

Image: Fractl