Rork founders Levan Kvirkvelia and Daniel Dhawan are living a life that sounds like a plot for a movie. But it really happened.
They went from broke, life savings spent, and in debt $15,000 apiece on credit cards — Dhawan was even sleeping on a mattress at a friend’s apartment — to $100,000 of revenue in five days.
And that led to a $2.8 million seed round led by Andreessen Horowitz’s new Speedrun program, with other backers piling in like Hustle Fund’s Elizabeth Yin, ChapterOne, Founders Inc., Austen Allred, Expo’s Charlie Cheever, and Evan Bacon, Runway’s Siqi Chen, and more.
All because one person tweeted about their mobile app vibe coder product, and the tweet went viral. Rork lets people with limited technical backgrounds build mobile apps with a simple text prompt.
On February 12, after months of work and one pivot, Kvirkvelia and Dhawan launched Rork with a tweet.
“We were complete underdogs. We were really running out of money really soon,” Dhawan told TechCrunch.
They had gotten a small check from one angel investor, Matt Shumer, the co-founder CEO of OthersideAI, which makes AI writing tool Hyperwrite.
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Their first tweet got passed around a bit, but it wasn’t until February 24, when people were tweeting about a competing product from a company called Bolt, that Shumer posted on X that he thought Rork was better than Bolt.
“My jaw just DROPPED,” Shumer wrote in his X post. “Rork lets you create entire iOS apps just by describing them! Zero. Code. Required. This changes everything for app development. Rork blows Bolt out of the water (and yes, I invested immediately after trying it).”
Shumer also included a video of Rork. And the post blew up, viewed more than 1 million times.
Usage of Rork instantly skyrocketed, too, but the founders were trapped. Each of them ran up $15,000 of debt on their credit cards to keep the app running.
“We were paying for AI out of our own pockets, basically, because we didn’t raise much funding,” Dhawan said. “We’re, like, almost, out of money. And then 15 minutes after this post, Austen Allred invested $100,000.”
By the end of the day of Shumer’s tweet, Founder’s Inc. and Hustle Fund’s Yin were already ready to invest, while warm intros to other investors and angels were flying. “So basically it was like, $350,000 that first day. And that was really, really crazy.”
Out of money
Although this sounds like an instant success — and by some measure, it is — it was more like rescue from a near-death experience for the founders.
This was their third bootstrapped startup each; they had previously developed hit mobile apps beginning when they were teens. They are now ages 25 (Kvirkvelia) and 27 (Dhawan).
But they had run through much of the cash earned by those other apps working on a Rork’s predecessor, a Cursor-like vibe coder geared toward nontechnical users.
Dhawan had been in San Francisco since December to attend Founders Inc. and fundraise, working through Christmas and sleeping on a mattress at a YC founder friend’s apartment, while Kvirkvelia stayed home in Georgia to build the new product. Fundraising wasn’t going well.
Then competitor Lovable launched and went instantly viral. But their product wasn’t ready to compete with Lovable. “We had the prototype finished already, and then they launched,” Dhawan recalls. “We were really disappointed.”
So Kvirkvelia convinced Dhawan that they should change course. Rather than building another Lovable, which tackles AI web coding, they should go back to their roots and build a Lovable for mobile apps.
No one had done this before — at least not well — because as hard as web development is, building native mobile apps is “like 10 times more complicated,” Kvirkvelia told TechCrunch..
So “we are the Lovable for Expo. The Lovable for React,” Kvirkvelia said, mentioning two popular mobile app development frameworks.
Then rival startup Bolt launched a mobile vibe coding product, and the founders had deja vu, fearing they were going to be beaten out of the market again. So they launched the same day as Bolt, Dhawan said.
After Shumer’s tweet went viral and angels began pouring in, one of their new angels introduced the founders to Andrew Chen, the general partner running Andreessen Horowitz’s new Speedrun program. Speedrun is a16z’s 12-week mentorship program for early-stage startups. It includes things like $5 million worth credits from the firm’s partners like AWS, Google Cloud, OpenAI, Microsoft, Nvidia, Stripe, Deel, and others. It typically invests up to $1 million, as well.
Chen reached out, but Dhawan didn’t jump immediately. He explained to Chen that he already had a pre-seed term sheet in hand from another firm. Chen, determined not to miss out, did his own speed run at his firm and quickly delivered a competing offer. The Rork founders accepted, nabbed their seed money, and will attend the cohort scheduled to begin on July 28.
“Daniel and Levan are highly technical polymaths who deeply understand mobile development and distribution, which has allowed them to build a fantastic platform quickly,” Chen told TechCrunch over email. “They’re exactly the type of founders we’re excited to back with a16z Speedrun.”
Even better than the funding, paying users are pouring in. Two months after Shumer’s viral tweet, this team of two hit $550,000 ARR, Dhawan says.
And he’s off the floor and living in his own apartment, now, too.
