As AI tools have democratized software engineering, a new generation of users have emerged, eager to build their own apps. But just as LLMs speed up the coding process, the old problems of hosting, security, and general DevOps problems have persisted.
There’s an obvious business opportunity in solving that problem, but with the system changing so quickly, it’s hard to know how to grab hold of it.
One of the more interesting answers comes from Modelence, a Y Combinator startup from this summer’s batch that announced on Wednesday it raised a $3 million seed round. Y Combinator led the round, with participation from Rebel Fund, Acacia Venture Capital Partners, Formosa VC, and Vocal Ventures.
Modelence isn’t the only company going after this sector. Giants like Google and Amazon, as well as smaller startups like Shuttle, are all trying to solve the infrastructure issue.
California-based Modelence stands out for how it’s diagnosing the problem. For CEO Aram Shatakhtsyan, the issue isn’t individual services; it’s the connections between them.
“You don’t want to ask AI to go build authentication and then set up a database and then connect them together, because it’s very likely to break,” Shatakhtsyan told TechCrunch in a recent interview.
It’s an interesting diagnosis because it explains how there can be so many world-class service providers contributing to such a rickety system.
“Vercel covers most of your front end, and Supabase covers the database and the layer on top of it. But you still have to stitch the rest of it together,” he said, explaining the various products software engineers use today. “In the best case, you get two cloud systems.” In short, there is a lot of room to make mistakes.
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Modelence’s approach is to provide something like an all-in-one service. Their framework, or toolkit, works on TypeScript, with the company handling authentication, databases, hosting, LLM observability tools, and even their own Lovable-style app builder just to eliminate the extra friction.
It’s an interesting idea, and it will be fun to see if they can draw in users. But with the landscape for code-adjacent tools changing this fast, it will be a real challenge just keeping up.
