DayZero Software Inc., a maker of secure software development tools that does business as Superblocks, today said it has raised $23 million in a Series A venture capital round extension, bringing its total funding to $60 million.

The company is addressing a problem caused by generative artificial intelligence: Large language models have made it easy for anyone to spin up software, but without information technology department oversight, the result is a mess of compliance risks and security holes.

The practice is called vibe coding. It involves using AI tools to generate software quickly based on natural language prompts, often without a deep understanding of the underlying code. While great for rapid prototyping, vibe coding carries the risk of errors, security holes and inadvertent disclosure of proprietary information. One recent study found that 62% of AI-generated software contains errors or security vulnerabilities.

“In the last 90 days, vibe coding became popularized, and in the next 90 days, we’ll see our first major security breach from vibe coding tools that aren’t under the purview of IT,” said Superbocks co-founder and Chief Executive Brad Menezes (pictured, left, with Chief Technology Officer Ran Ma).

Enterprise-savvy agent

Superblocks’ answer is Clark, an AI agent that turns natural language prompts into secure, production-grade applications written in React, a JavaScript library optimized for building user interfaces that can also support production-grade applications. “React is the largest front-end framework in the world so you can build pretty much any user interface with it, and most of the modern web is on it,” Menezes said.

Clark routes requests through a cadre of specialized AI agents covering design, security, quality assurance and IT policy. That mimics how a real internal development team operates.

The idea came to Menezes during his time as a product management director at Datadog Inc. “Customers monitoring internal apps kept telling me how hard it was to build and maintain them,” he said. “There was nothing on the market they could buy. They had to build custom.”

Superblocks is betting that the volume of homegrown software in use in enterprises will grow as generative AI lowers barriers to entry. Clark uses an assortment of popular LLMS that are trained using “unique, enterprise context on the company’s design system,” Menezes said. “When you build an application in Superblocks, you know it has the right audit logging, permissions, private data and integration.”

React is popular with front-end developers and is open-source, meaning there’s no vendor lock-in and the language is “infinitely extensible,” Menezes said. Clark is currently in early access availability.

Investors in this round include Kleiner Perkins LLC, Spark Capital Partners LLC, Greenoaks Capital Partners LLC, Meritech Capital Partners LP and individuals. Menezes said the money will be used to double the number of employees from the current 50 and to beef up engineering and marketing efforts.

Photo: Superblocks