Rourke’s founders, Levan Kwirkberia and Daniel Dhawan, live a life that sounds like a film’s plot. But it really happened.
They were broken, spent on saving lives, and $15,000 on credit cards in debt (Drwan was sleeping on a mattress in a friend’s apartment) earned $100,000 in five days.
And that led to a $2.8 million seed round led by Andreesen Horowitz’s new Speedrun program, with other backers piling up like Hustle Fund Elizabeth Inn, Chapter On, Founders Inc., Austin Allred, Expo’s Charlie Cheever, Evan Bacon, and Runway Suichen.
One person tweeted about the Vibe Coder mobile app, and the tweet went viral. Rork allows people with limited technical backgrounds to build mobile apps with simple text prompts.
On February 12th, after several months of work and one pivot, Kvirkvelia and Dhawan launched Rork in a tweet.
“We were totally underdogs. We really quickly had a shortage of money,” Dhawan told TechCrunch.
They received a small check from Matt Shumer, one angel investor who is the co-founder CEO of other IDEAIs who hyperwrite AI writing tools.
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Their first tweet was handed a bit, but it was posted on the X, when people were tweeting about the company’s competing products called Bolts, Schumer thought Rourke was better than Bolts.
“My chin just fell,” Schumer wrote in his X-Post. “In Rork, you can create an entire iOS app. Zero. Code. You need it. This changes everything for app development. Rork blows the bolts out of the water (and yes, I invested right after trying it).”
Schumer also included a video of Rourke. And the post exploded, and it was viewed over a million times.
The use of Rourke quickly surged, but founders were locked in. Each of them ran a $15,000 debt on their credit cards to keep the app running.
“Essentially, we didn’t raise much funding, so we were paying for AI from our pocket,” Dhawan said. “We’re pretty much out of money, and 15 minutes after this post, Austin Allred invested $100,000.”
By the end of Shumer’s tweet day, the shadows of Founder’s Inc. and Hustle Fund were already ready to invest, but warm introductions from other investors and angels had been flying. “So basically it was like $350,000 on that first day. It was really, really crazy.”
From money
This sounds like an immediate success, but to some extent, it was like rescue from near-death experiences for the founder.
This was the third bootstrap startup each. They previously developed a mobile app that was a hit when they were teenagers. He is currently 25 years old (Kvirkvelia) and 27 years old (Dhawan).
But they were running much of the cash they earned by Rourke’s predecessor, the other apps working on cursor-like atmosphere coders for non-technical users.
Dhawan has been in San Francisco since December to attend fundraising with Founders Inc. Funding wasn’t working.
Competitors then launched Lovable, which quickly went viral. However, their products were not ready to compete with the lovable ones. “We’ve already completed the prototype and then they launched,” recalls Dhawan. “We were really disappointed.”
So Kvirkvelia convinced Dhawan that he should change courses. Rather than building another lovable thing to work on AI web coding, you need to go back to your roots and build lovable things to your mobile app.
No one has done this before because it’s as difficult as web development. Building a native mobile app is “like 10 times more complicated,” Kvirkvelia told TechCrunch.
So, “We’re adorable to the expo. We’re adorable to the response,” Kvirkvelia said, referring to two popular mobile app development frameworks.
Later, rival startup Bolt launched a mobile vibe coding product, and the founder had Deja Vu, fearing that he would be beaten from the market again. So they launched on the same day as Bolt, Dhawan said.
Schumer’s tweet went viral and the angels began pouring, one of the new angels introduced Andrew Chen to the founder. Speedrun is A16Z’s 12-week mentorship program for early-stage startups. This includes $5 million worth units from partners in companies such as AWS, Google Cloud, Openai, Microsoft, Nvidia, Stripe, and Deel. Typically, you invest up to $1 million.
Chen reached out to him, but Dhawan didn’t jump right away. He explains to Chen that he already had the previous term seat from another company in his hand. Determined not to overlook, Chen ran his own speed run in his company, quickly offering competing offers. The founders of Rourke will accept, grab the seed money and attend a cohort scheduled to begin on July 28th.
“Daniel and Levan are very technical polymers with a deep understanding of mobile development and distribution, and were able to quickly build a great platform,” Chen told TechCrunch via email. “They are exactly the type of founders who are excited to return with A16Z Speedrun.”
Dhawan said it’s better than fundraising two months after Shumer’s viral tweet, two months after Shumer’s viral tweet, and two months after Shumer’s viral tweet.
And he got off the floor and still lives in his apartment.