Software documentation-the thing that explains how software works and how to use it-has changed dramatically over the past few decades. What once was used to come solely in the form of PDFs and static plaintext, today docs are more interactive and user-friendly in their services.

But crafting them is still a time sink. Two devs and entrepreneurs, Han Wang and Hahnbee Lee, say they are no exception.

"Companies like Stripe, HashiCorp, Twilio and a bunch of others set a high bar for developer content in the 2010s," Wang said. "They proved that a truly great developer experience for their content is not just a commodity but a competitive advantage. And since then, every company has tried to catch up, but it's quite hard."

Inspired to streamline the workflows to publish docs-especially because it made their life easier-Wang and Lee built Mintlify, which is a suite of documentation-authoring tools, including those that can auto-generate docs from codebases.
"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 editors are fundamentally interacting with the content because of AI.".

An AI-powered vision
Wang and Lee met in college. The two attended Cornell; Lee was a computer science undergrad, and Wang was studying for a bachelor's in information science.

Wang founded his first two companies as a student: FoodFul, a remote monitoring system for livestock; and People, a platform to help build customer communities. After People, which Lee helped found, was acquired by user engagement firm Bettermode, Wang remained there for several months but left to become a partner at Bain Capital Ventures.

Wang departed from Bain in 2021-the same year that he and Lee conceived the idea of launching Mintlify. They raised seed capital from Bain (leveraging on Wang's connections) and other investors, including Sourcegraph co-founder Quinn Slack, to build the platform into a business.

At a high level, Mintlify helps devs write guides, API references, SDK docs, and chatbots powered by OpenAI's API that explains the ins and outs of their software and services. Built-in components and templates for basic doc formatting are provided, and the structure of documents is designed to be embedded in a codebase.
But Mintlify also scans regularly for "stale" documentation, analyzes how users engage with the content and suggests ways to improve readability.

However, there are also some disadvantages in the automation features of Mintlify.

For his part, an early user and DevClass' Tim Anderson says that comments added by Mintlify are of "little value," and in one case, reiterated the same factually wrong sentence four times over in a doc. Others point out that Mintlify can easily get confused by poorly organized and unoptimized code, or any code that is otherwise poorly written.

Wang has to say more about potential use cases for AI on the platform rather than limitations, but remains vocal about the fact that humans cannot be completely removed from the loop when it comes to content documentation.

"As we see it, the role of content is changing with AI, Wang said. "Documentation will automatically evolve in real time from support messages, the codebase and product feedback." AI will assist in writing technical content automatically based on product changes and user feedback."

Growing business
Mintlify isn't the only startup to try to reshape how devs create and share their technical guide.

Guidde is one of them, whose AI automatically generates software documentation videos. More along the lines of what Mintlify is doing, Documatic automatically produces changelogs and explanations from code besides documentation.

I mentioned some competitors to Wang, and he noted that Mintlify has a pretty impressive customer list: Anthropic, Cursor, Perplexity, Zapier, Polymarket, Fidelity, and around 3,000 others. (Wang estimates that Mintlify's tools reach more than 1.5 million developers a month.)

He also hinted at differentiation capabilities coming to the Mintlify platform in the near future.

"Every documentation now needs to have an AI chat to answer questions directly. But it will go much deeper into that," said Wang. "Content creation will also change … The content will be used to power support, chatbots and generative AI models themselves. Content will also be personalized for every reader."

To make that 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 that the new cash will be put toward expanding Mintlify's 11-person team and product development.

We've always focused on running lean and efficient, Wang said. "We didn't need to fundraise, but strategically decided to do so in order to fuel further growth."

Wang did not address questions about Mintlify's revenue and profitability.