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Rork founders Levan Kvirkvelia and Daniel Dhawan are living a life that sounds like a plot for a movie. But it really happened.\u00a0<\/p>\n
They went from broke, life savings spent, and in debt $15,000 apiece on credit cards \u2014 Kvirkvelia was even sleeping on a mattress at a friend\u2019s apartment \u2014 to $100,000 of revenue in five days.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n
And that led to a $2.8 million seed round led by Andreessen Horowitz\u2019s new Speedrun program, with other backers piling in like Hustle Fund\u2019s Elizabeth Yin, ChapterOne, Founders Inc., Austen Allred, Expo\u2019s Charlie Cheever, and Evan Bacon, Runway\u2019s Siqi Chen, and more.<\/p>\n
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.\u00a0<\/p>\n
On February 12, after months of work and one pivot, Kvirkvelia and Dhawan launched Rork with a tweet.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u201cWe were complete underdogs. We were really running out of money really soon,\u201d Dhawan told TechCrunch.<\/p>\n
They had gotten a small check from one angel investor, Matt Shumer, the co-founder CEO of OthersideAI, which makes AI writing tool Hyperwrite.<\/p>\n
Techcrunch event<\/p>\n
\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\tBerkeley, CA<\/span> \t\t\t\t\t\t\t Their first tweet got passed around a bit, but it wasn\u2019t 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.<\/p>\n \u201cMy jaw just DROPPED,\u201d Shumer wrote in his X post<\/a>. \u201cRork 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).\u201d<\/p>\n Shumer also included a video of Rork. And the post blew up, viewed more than 1 million times.\u00a0<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n \u201cWe were paying for AI out of our own pockets, basically, because we didn\u2019t raise much funding,\u201d Dhawan said. \u201cWe\u2019re, like, almost, out of money. And then 15 minutes after this post, Austen Allred invested $100,000.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n By the end of the day of Shumer\u2019s tweet, Founder\u2019s Inc. and Hustle Fund\u2019s Yin were already ready to invest, while warm intros to other investors and angels were flying. \u201cSo basically it was like, $350,000 that first day. And that was really, really crazy.\u201d<\/p>\n Although this sounds like an instant success \u2014 and by some measure, it is \u2014 it was more like rescue from a near-death experience for the founders.<\/p>\n 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).<\/p>\n But they had run through much of the cash earned by those other apps working on a Rork\u2019s predecessor, a Cursor-like vibe coder geared toward nontechnical users.<\/p>\n Dhawan had been in San Francisco since December to attend Founders Inc. and fundraise, working through Christmas and <\/strong>sleeping on a mattress at a YC founder friend\u2019s apartment, while Kvirkvelia stayed home in Georgia to build the new product. Fundraising wasn\u2019t going well.<\/p>\n
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\n\t\t\t\t<\/a>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n<\/p><\/div>\n<\/div>\nOut of money<\/h2>\n