Dead AI dev tools products.
$770M of capital across this category
AI for developers. The category that was supposed to be the easy one - sell to people who would actually pay for software, target a workflow that already had a wallet. Kite predated Copilot by years and could not figure out how to charge. Microsoft retired LUIS and QnA Maker once LLMs made hand-labeled intent classifiers obsolete. GitHub Copilot Voice died because nobody at Microsoft thought it was a real product. Our essay on selling AI to developers traces the two ways these died: obsolesced by the platform they sat on, or absorbed by the chipmaker or lab whose stack they optimized, from OctoAI and CentML into Nvidia to Humanloop into Anthropic.
GitHub Models
2024 - 2026GitHub's free model playground, catalog, and inference API, built to put frontier models one click from the repository and retired before it turned two.
Undisclosed raised · 2 years aliveBud (formerly Orchids)
2025 - 2026A prompt-to-app builder out of Y Combinator that promised anyone could describe software and get it deployed, then grew into an agent with a computer.
Undisclosed raised · 2 years aliveContinue
2023 - 2026An open-source coding assistant that let developers point their editor at any model they liked and keep the configuration in a file they owned.
$5M raised · 3 years aliveSnazzy AI / Smart Copy
2020 - 2026An early GPT-3 copywriting tool that Unbounce bought, renamed Smart Copy, and later switched off as a standalone product.
Undisclosed raised · 5 years alivePhind
2022 - 2026An AI answer engine built for developers that resolved coding questions with cited sources, later running its own large models.
$10M raised · 3 years aliveMicrosoft QnA Maker
2017 - 2025An Azure service that turned FAQ pages and documents into a question-answering bot.
Undisclosed raised · 8 years aliveMicrosoft Language Understanding (LUIS)
2016 - 2025An Azure cloud service for adding natural language intent recognition to bots and apps.
Undisclosed raised · 10 years aliveHumanloop
2020 - 2025A development platform for building, evaluating, and monitoring LLM applications, used by companies like Duolingo, Gusto, and Vanta.
$44M raised · 6 years aliveCentML
2022 - 2025A Canadian startup that built an optimization layer between AI models and chips to squeeze more performance and lower cost out of compute.
$31M raised · 4 years aliveCodeParrot
2022 - 2025A Y Combinator-backed tool that turned Figma designs and screenshots into production front-end code.
$500K raised · 4 years aliveBuilder.ai
2016 - 2025A no-code app builder that promised software as easy as ordering pizza, with an AI assistant that turned out to be mostly human.
$445M raised · 9 years aliveDashworks
2019 - 2025An AI assistant that answered work questions by searching across a company's documents, messages, tickets, and connected apps.
$10M raised · 5 years aliveOctoAI
2019 - 2024A managed platform for running and optimizing open-source AI models cheaply across different hardware, built by the creators of Apache TVM.
$132M raised · 6 years aliveGitHub Copilot Voice ("Hey, GitHub")
2022 - 2024A voice-controlled coding assistant that let developers dictate code and editor commands to Copilot.
Undisclosed raised · 1 year aliveGalactica
2022 - 2022Meta's large language model for science, trained on 48 million papers, textbooks, and encyclopedias that could summarize research, generate equations, and annotate molecules.
Undisclosed raised · 1 year aliveKite
2014 - 2022A Python-focused AI code completion plugin that predated GitHub Copilot by years.
$17M raised · 9 years aliveAtrium
2017 - 2020A law firm and software company that promised to automate startup legal work with machine learning.
$76M raised · 3 years alive