Mobile application development startup Woz Inc. has raised $6 million to take on the emerging “vibe coding” industry with an alternative platform that’s said to combine generative artificial intelligence with human oversight at every step to create “business-ready” mobile apps.

The seed funding round announced today was led by Cervin Ventures and saw participation from Burst Capital, Y Combinator, Untapped Ventures, MGV and the Lacob Family that co-owns the Golden State Warriors.

Woz is aimed at small business owners, entrepreneurs, side hustlers, creators and consultants who want to be able to build safe, reliable and sleek-looking mobile applications for business, without having to hire a development team. It says its platform can be used to create everything from marketplaces to membership management tools, coaching apps to directories or client portals to loyalty programs.

The startup’s targeted client base might think they can already build such applications with better-known vibe coding platforms such as Lovable, Replit or Vercel, but the reality is rather different, the startup says. While they can dramatically accelerate development times for new applications, there’s a lot of concern about the quality of the code they generate. Oftentimes, AI-generated apps have issues that require skilled developers to fix, and so they’re not really mature enough to enable everyone to become a software developer, Woz said.

Woz backs up these claims with a recent analysis from Barclays, which shows that site visits to Loveable have dropped 40% from their peak in June. Similarly, traffic to competing vibe coding platforms such as Bolt.new and Vercel v0 has fallen by 27% and 64%, respectively. There are plenty of other data points about the effectiveness of AI-generated code. For instance, a 2024 study by Bilkent University researchers found that the latest versions of ChatGPT, GitHub Copilot and Amazon CodeWhisperer created “correct code” just 65%, 46% and 31% of the time, respectively.

Woz positions itself differently, taking what it calls an “anti-vibe coding approach” that doesn’t rely on giving AI unlimited freedom. Instead, it combines agentic AI with manufacturing processes to establish clear tasks, guidelines and guardrails. When it comes to generating code, Woz breaks down the app development process into discrete steps, assigning highly specialized AI agents to complete each task. In this way, its generative AI development process is more like a traditional factory assembly line. Co-founder and CEO Ben Collins likened the company to an “AI app factory.”

Once the mobile app is ready, Woz’s human engineering experts step in to conduct a careful review and ensure that everything is in order. Should that reviewers find any problems, they’ll pass the app to a human developer to fix the code.

Woz, which positions itself as a “trusted partner” for entrepreneurs and business owners, says it’s the first vibe coding system to integrate human collaboration. As a result, the apps it generates differ from the spaghetti-like code whipped up by other AI systems. It promises that every line of code will be clean, well-structured, human-readable and secure.

Boddle Learning Inc. co-founder and Chief Executive Injil Muhamad said he used Woz’s platform to create his company’s Android and iOS applications, and was delighted with the results. “Vibe coding tools are great for quickly testing ideas, but moving toward sustainable, production-ready applications requires technical expertise that is not easy to find,” he said.

Another advantage of Woz is that it doesn’t just build the mobile applications, but also deploys them in the cloud, publishes them in app stores and maintains them as real production software. That’s in contrast to most vibe coding platforms, where users have to figure out deployment, set up the underlying databases and hosting infrastructure, and publish them by themselves.

Holger Mueller of Constellation Research Inc. said Woz is looking at the reality for many business users, who are not programmers and don’t want to play around “vibing with code,” but instead just build applications that work. “They want to use automation to build apps in the most natural way, and that means talking,” the analyst explained. “Woz looks to have created a very useful tool for doing that, but it’s not yet clear how much the business user population really wants to own its automation destiny. We will see how well it’s received, or if competitors emerge.”

Cervin Ventures Partner Taylor Oliver said he’s backing Woz because he thinks vibe coding is not the end game. While it’s extremely promising and already proving useful, he believes the real breakthrough will be made when AI-generated apps are capable of producing scalable and secure code for anyone.

The startup is extremely ambitious, and says it will use the money from its seed funding round to accelerate the development of its platform and hire more expert software engineers to meet the growing demand for its services.

Collins said he wants to expand beyond just mobile apps. “Tomorrow it will be web apps, TV apps, IoT software, AR and VR and specialized software for regulated sectors like healthcare and insurance,” he promised. “It’s a new approach to product building. Just as the physical factory powered the industrial revolution, Woz will unlock the next great leap in how the world builds.”

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