Dead AI dev tools products.
$765M 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.
Snazzy 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