"We want to give you an offer."

Two months ago, I heard these words from a VC.
As an 18-year-old immigrant and high school student, raising an $800K pre-seed round feels surreal.

I’m beyond thankful and excited to announce 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 from RTP Global — it’s been incredible working with you. Thank you for believing in our mission. I can’t wait to see what we’ll accomplish together over the next 12 months.

A special thank you goes to Eric, the first person who invested in my vision. Your guidance (even answering Slack messages at 3 a.m.!) has been invaluable.

Over the past year, I’ve worked relentlessly on Kodezi — what many now call the “Grammarly for programmers.”
After launching our closed beta, the response blew me away: thousands of signups, conversations with engineers and students from places like MIT, Stanford, Harvard — and even my own high school.

Everyone shared the same pain:
They wanted to spend less time debugging and more time building.

The reality is shocking: it takes 30x longer to fix a bug than to write the original code. And yet, existing solutions don’t address this fundamental problem.

At the same time, I found myself pitching angel investors, VCs, and tech executives — conversations I never imagined having at 18.

Many meetings ended with:

• "We love your idea, but you're too young."

• "Will people actually use this?"

• "You should work for a company first."

I’d be lying if I said those rejections didn’t affect me. But the validation from users kept me going — because I knew Kodezi could have a profound impact, especially in education.

Today, we’re piloting Kodezi across my local school district, and we were selected for the prestigious Elite 200 at the ASU+GSV Summit, showcasing the most innovative edtech startups globally.

Beyond education, Kodezi is catching the attention of engineers at companies like Slack, Airbase, Amazon, and Tesla — reaching out to us for help with improving debugging and speeding up product delivery.

We’re now building Kodezi to support:

• Team collaboration

• Large codebases

• IDE extensions

• Enterprise-grade features

So yes — I’m 18.
I'm unproven.
I'm too young to legally drink at networking events.
But I've learned more in this past year than I ever could have imagined.
It’s been exciting, stressful, terrifying, and unforgettable — a crash course that feels like my own self-taught MBA.

With this new round of funding, an incredible team, and a strong support system behind me, I’m excited for the future.
We’re just getting started.

Thank you for being part of the journey.