Two months ago, a VC looked at me and said, "We want to give you an offer."
As an eighteen year old immigrant and high school student, hearing those words felt surreal. Raising an $800K pre seed round at eighteen is something I still have trouble processing.

I am beyond thankful and excited to share that Water Tower Ventures and RTP Global have invested in Kodezi’s pre seed round. Huge thanks to Jeremy, Idan, and the entire Water Tower team, and to Tom and Alex at RTP Global. It has been incredible working with you. Thank you for believing in our mission. I cannot wait to see what we accomplish together over the next twelve months.

A very special thank you goes to Eric, the first person who invested in my vision. Thank you for the guidance, the advice, and the dedication. And thank you for answering my Slack messages at 3 a.m. when any reasonable human should have been asleep.

How it started

Over the past year, I have worked relentlessly on building Kodezi, what many people started calling the "Grammarly for programmers."
When we launched our closed beta, the response blew me away.

Thousands of signups.
Messages from engineers and students at MIT, Stanford, Harvard, and even my own high school.
Everyone had the same pain.
They wanted to spend less time debugging and more time building.

The reality is wild. It takes 30 times longer to fix a bug than to write the original code. Yet most tools still do nothing to address this.

At the same time, I found myself pitching angels, VCs, and tech executives. Conversations I never imagined I would be having at eighteen.

And many of those conversations ended with:

"We love the idea, but you're too young."
"Will people actually use this?"
"You should work for a company first."

I would be lying if I said those rejections did not affect me. But every time a student or engineer told me Kodezi helped them, it reminded me why I started.

Real traction

Today, we are piloting Kodezi across my local school district, helping students write better code and understand their mistakes faster.

We were also selected for the Elite 200 at the ASU+GSV Summit, a list highlighting the most innovative edtech startups in the world.

And it is not just students.
Engineers at Slack, Airbase, Amazon, and Tesla have reached out wanting to use Kodezi to improve debugging and accelerate product delivery.

What we are building now

We are now expanding Kodezi to support:

• Team collaboration

• Large codebases

• IDE extensions

• Enterprise grade features

A very real eighteen year old founder moment

So yes, I am eighteen.
I am unproven.
I am too young to legally drink at networking events.
And the bartenders always look at me like I am lost.

But in the past year, I have learned more than I ever could have expected. It has been exciting, stressful, terrifying, and unforgettable. It feels like my own self taught MBA compressed into twelve months.

With this new round of funding, an incredible team, and a strong support system behind me, I am more excited for the future than ever.

We are just getting started.

Thank you for being part of the journey.