2022年5月30日

Mintlify是一家開發軟件自動化文檔任務的初創公司，今天宣布在種子輪融資中獲得280萬美元，由貝恩資本投資公司領投，TwentyTwo Ventures和Sourcegraph聯合創始人Quinn Slack參與。Mintlify首席執行官王漢表示，這筆資金將用於產品開發，並在年底前將Mintlify的三人核心團隊擴大一倍。Mintlify總部位於紐約伊薩卡，由Han Wang和Hahnbee Lee於2021年共同創立，兩人都是軟件工程師。Wang此前曾聯合創辦了一家名為Foodful的初創公司，為奶牛開發了基於雲的監控係統;還有一家名為Pe ple的在線客戶社區平台，該平台於2021年初被Tribe收購。李開複曾是Pe•ple的聯合創始人，後來曾短暫加入多鄰國(Duolingo)擔任工程師。Wang表示，Mintlify的想法來自於他和Lee在軟件開發方麵的經驗，這涉及到處理並不總是完整或最高質量的文檔。他們的觀察結果與2017年GitHub的一項調查一致，該調查發現93%的開發人員認為不完整或過時的文檔是一個普遍存在的問題。“我們曾在從初創公司到大型科技公司的各個階段的公司擔任軟件工程師，發現他們都受到糟糕文檔的困擾，如果文檔真的存在的話，”王在電子郵件采訪中告訴TechCrunch。“文檔是初級工程師和那些跳入新代碼庫的人的生命線。它可以幫助高級開發人員在將來向其他人解釋他們的代碼時節省時間。 For public-facing and open-source products, documentation has a direct impact on user adoption.” Image Credits: Mintlify Mintlify aims to address the challenges around documentation with automation, specifically auto-generating documentation. The company’s platform reads code and creates docs to explain it, leveraging technologies including natural language processing and web scraping. Wang declined to reveal more about Mintlify’s technical underpinnings, but generating documentation from code is well within the realm of possibility with today’s AI techniques. That’s evidenced by the fact that Mintlify has several competitors taking similar approaches, including Documatic, whose AI system automatically generates changelogs and explanations from code in addition to documentation. Wang asserts that Mintlify provides “significantly” higher-quality results than its rivals, and — unlike some — doesn’t force developers to host documentation on a cloud service. “Mintlify’s mission is to solve documentation rot by developing continuous documentation into a standard practice for software teams,” Wang added. “[W]hen engineering managers are actively seeking solutions for better documentation practices, … that’s when we step in.” Beyond generating documentation, Mintlify routinely scans for “stale” documentation and detects how users engage with the documentation to improve its readability. (Wang emphasized that the platform doesn’t store code and encrypts all user data at rest and in transit.) Mintlify, which is free for individual developers, also integrates with existing systems including Slack, Dropbox, and GitHub for automating task management and development workflows. According to Wang, adoption of Mintlify’s free plan has been growing 20% every week since its January launch. With the user base now eclipsing 6,000 active accounts, the company plans to shift its focus to a premium offering oriented toward enterprise customers. “The pandemic standardized a decentralized and asynchronous work environment. This made high-quality documentation critical to achieving efficient communication, onboarding, and product development,” Wang said. “Our expansion into workflow automations is addressing the challenge by targeting the engineering managers with our existing fanbase serving as champions.”