Software documentation—the resources that explain how software works and how to use it—has evolved dramatically over the past few decades. Once mostly in the form of PDFs and static plain text, today’s documents are more interactive and user-friendly than they used to be.
But the creation of them is still a lake of time. Han Wang and Hahnbee Lee, both developers and entrepreneurs, say they have personally struggled with this.
“In the 2010s, companies like Stripe, HashiCorp, Twilio and a bunch of others raised the bar on developer content,” Wang said. “They showed that a really great developer experience for their content is not just a commodity, but a competitive advantage. Since then, every company has tried to find it, but it’s actually quite difficult.”
Inspired by trying to simplify workflows for publishing documents (mainly to make their own lives easier), Wang and Lee created Mintlify, a collection of documentation authoring tools, including tools that can auto-generate code base documents.
“In the 2020s, the bar for documentation is rising once again,” Wang said. “This time, it’s not just with the UI, but the way developers and publishers fundamentally interact with content through AI.”
An AI-powered vision
Wang and Lee met in college. Both attended Cornell; Lee was a computer science student, and Wang was studying for a bachelor’s degree in information science.
As a student, Wang founded two companies: FoodFul, a system for remotely monitoring animals, and People, a platform for building customer communities. After People (which Lee helped found) was acquired by user engagement firm Bettermode, Wang stayed on for several months, but eventually left to become a partner at Bain Capital Ventures.
Wang left Bain in 2021, which was right around the time he and Lee came up with the idea for Mintlify. They raised seed capital from Bain (leveraging Wang’s connections) and others, including Sourcegraph co-founder Quinn Slack, to grow the platform into a business.
At a high level, Mintlify helps developers with scripting guides, API references, SDK docs, and chatbots (powered by OpenAI’s API) to explain the ins and outs of their software and services. It provides built-in components and templates for document base formatting, and structures documents so that they can be embedded in a code base.
To help maintain documentation, Mintlify also routinely scans for “stale” documentation and detects how users are engaging with the content to suggest ways to improve readability.
But there is some criticism of Mintlify’s automation features.
One early user, Tim Anderson of DevClass, claims that Mintlify adds comments to code bases that are of “little value,” and in one case repeated the same incorrect sentence in a document four times. Others have pointed out that Mintlify can be confusing from disorganized and unoptimized, or otherwise poorly written, code.
Wang emphasizes the potential of the platform’s AI over its limitations, while implying that humans cannot be removed from the documentation writing cycle.
“As we saw it, the role of content was changing with AI. Documentation will automatically evolve in real time from support messages, the code base and product feedback,” said Wang. “AI assistance will help companies write technical content automatically based on product changes and user feedback.”
A growing business
Mintlify isn’t the only startup trying to revamp how developers create and publish technical guides.
There’s Guidde, whose AI automatically generates software documentation videos. More in line with what Mintlify does, Documatic automatically produces changes and explanations from the code in addition to the documentation.
I mentioned rivals to Wang, and he responded by highlighting Mintlify’s rather impressive client list, which includes Anthropic, Cursor, Perplexity, Zapier, Polymarket, Fidelity and about 3,000 other brands. (Wang estimates that Mintlify’s tools reach more than 1.5 million developers a month).
He also hinted at different capabilities coming to the Mintlify platform in the near future.
“Every document must now have an AI chat to answer questions directly. But it will go much further than that,” Wang said. “Content creation will also change… Content will be used to power support, chatbots and the generative AI models themselves. Content will also be personalized for each reader.”
To make this vision a reality, Mintlify recently closed an $18.5 million Series A funding round led by Andreessen Horowitz with participation from Bain and Y Combinator. (Andreessen Horowitz general partner Jennifer Li is joining Mintlify’s board as part of the deal.) This brings Mintlify’s total raised to $21.7 million; Wang says the new cash will be put toward expanding Mintlify’s 11-person team and product development.
“We always focus on lean and efficient operation,” Wang said. “We do not need to raise funds, but we decided strategically to fuel further growth.”
Wang declined to answer questions about Mintlify’s revenue and profitability.