A startup called Driver AI is looking to ease the headaches around technical documentation for new software and hardware products after closing on an $8 million seed funding round.

Today’s round was led by Google LLC’s venture capital arm GV, and saw participation from Y Combinator and a host of angel investors.

Driver has created artificial intelligence software that can help teams to document, understand and deliver new technology much faster in order to accelerate engineer onboarding and time to market for new products.

The company is showcasing its technology for the first time at the Embedded World North America event in Austin, Texas, this week. It has created a generative AI-powered platform that does a couple of very interesting things, taking existing technical documentation that’s littered with difficult to understand jargon, and simplifying it so users can understand it much more easily. In the company’s own words, it can “transform lengthy, complex manuals into clear, concise explanations” to speed up onboarding for new team members.

In addition, Driver says, it can generate technical documentation for new products entirely from scratch. It can do this in about two hours, which is much faster than the average three months it takes engineers to craft the same documents manually.

In terms of existing documentation, Driver says it can translate this into “customer-facing” documentation that helps engineers to “instantly understand” complex new technologies. In doing this, it can save the average engineer from spending hours of their time trying to understand the jargon that typically litters such documents.

Driver co-founder and Chief Executive Adam Tilton said the company’s goal is to enable “user-tailored” understanding of complex technology, so engineering teams can quickly access the most important information within documents. “Driver is the first solution to create clear and compelling explanations that make technology more accessible for customers and partners, while ensuring documentation is drafted quickly and stays consistently up to date,” he said.

According to Driver, its technology should be especially useful in the semiconductor industry, where chipmakers typically create manuals for each new chipset that are filled with thousands of pages of user-guides and source code. Their customers will then spend many months trying to understand the new chips and implement them in their own products. With Driver, companies can rapidly decode these complex documents and accelerate time to market while “driving” substantial time and cost savings.

Another interesting feature of Driver’s platform is that it can be synchronized with existing technical documents posted on repositories such as GitHub, so if they’re updated, it will immediately update its simplified version of those documents. In this way, teams can stay up to date as the codebase evolves over time.

In addition, Driver provides a unified search capability for users to quickly find contextual information, plus reusable templates with defined sections and instructions on how to complete specific kinds of documents.

GV Partner Luna Schmid said Driver has come up with a novel use case for generative AI that can address a large and untapped market opportunity. “We believe Driver is a game changer for any team that needs to document complicated technology quickly and ensure it can be understood by all constituents,” he said.

Driver said the funds from today’s round will help to accelerate its momentum by expanding its engineering team and building out its product roadmap.

Image: Driver