Chris Ried - Unsplash |
Mintlify, a startup developing software to automate software documentation tasks, today announced that it raised $2.8 million in a seed round led by Bain Capital Ventures with participation from TwentyTwo Ventures and Quinn Slack, Sourcegraph’s co-founder. Wang said the idea for Mintlify came from his and Lee’s experiences in software development, which involved working with documentation that wasn’t always complete or of the highest quality. Their observations agree with a 2017 GitHub survey, which found that 93% of developers consider incomplete or outdated documentation to be a pervasive problem. We’ve worked as software engineers at companies in all stages ranging from startups to Big Tech and found that they all suffer from bad documentation if it even existed at all, Wang told TechCrunch in an email interview.
Documentation is the lifeline for junior engineers and those jumping into new codebases. Mintlify aims to address the challenges around documentation with automation, specifically auto-generating documentation. Wang declined to reveal more about Mintlify’s technical underpinnings, but generating documentation from code is well within the realm of possibility with today’s AI techniques. That’s evidenced by the fact that Mintlify has several competitors taking similar approaches, including Documatic, whose AI system automatically generates changelogs and explanations from code in addition to documentation.
Mintlify’s mission is to solve documentation rot by developing continuous documentation into a standard practice for software teams, Wang added. Beyond generating documentation, Mintlify routinely scans for stale documentation and detects how users engage with the documentation to improve its readability. This made high-quality documentation critical to achieving efficient communication, onboarding, and product development, Wang said.
Nate Grant - Unsplash |
Wang declined to reveal more about Mintlify’s technical underpinnings, but generating documentation from code is well within the realm of possibility with today’s AI techniques. Wang asserts that Mintlify provides significantly higher quality results than its rivals, and — unlike some — doesn’t force developers to host documentation on a cloud service. When engineering managers are actively seeking solutions for better documentation practices … that’s when we step in.