The technical documentation for chips within the semiconductor business is usually hundreds of pages lengthy. Conserving these paperwork up to date with each revision is a large carry, as is producing the manuals and tutorials for engineers who then implement these chips in their very own merchandise. And to make issues much more sophisticated, only a few merchandise solely use a single chip, even when they’re seemingly as easy as an influence software.
Driver, a startup popping out of stealth right this moment and saying an $8 million seed funding spherical led by GV, makes use of AI to chop this whole course of all the way down to only some hours, whereas additionally giving companies the chance to generate user-specific documentation.
The corporate’s CEO and co-founder Adam Tilton launched (and bought) quite a few startups, together with wearables startup Rithmio, earlier than touchdown at Nike after it acquired his edge computing and machine studying startup Aktive. Whereas at Nike, he met his co-founder and CTO Daniel Hensley, who on the time was a part of the management group of a small agency that helped purchasers combine embedded units and use machine studying. After leaving Nike, Tilton went to work at healthcare startup Ranges, the place he led sign processing for a {hardware} mission. To spherical out the group, additionally they introduced on Jimmy Hugill as co-founder and CFO.
“All through my profession, I’ve achieved lots of growth for embedded applied sciences that have been to then be utilized by others,” Tilton mentioned. “At Rithmio, we had a library of performance that wearable product producers may use to allow some performance. At Nike, I used to be a shopper. I’d purchase parts. I used to be on the choice committee to take the parts — after which we have been attempting to construct a product out of them. And I’ve simply again and again in my profession, needed to work on this specific problem.”
The documentation for these parts is usually very low stage, with instance code that may be old-fashioned and targeted on solely a single programming language.
“Daniel [Hensley] and I have been doing a lit evaluate to get deep into the know-how and I had the concept I ought to go into the PDF and pull out every of the totally different APIs, and go into the instance code, and pull out the instance code, and successfully get ChatGPT to do the serious about how I’m supposed to do that in Python, as a result of I needed to wrap all of this right into a Python program built-in into our automated testing system,” Tilton mentioned.
After seeing this, Hensley recommended constructing a software program platform to assist engineers do that at scale — one which caters to each the suppliers of chipsets like microcontrollers, ASICs, and FPGAs, in addition to the engineers who then must translate these paperwork for their very own merchandise.
Even inside an organization, a lot of the interior documentation for constructing a sure product can turn out to be outdated as new parts are launched. Driver, which is language-agnostic, goals to be an answer for these use circumstances, in addition to serving to consumers and sellers preserve their inside documentation updated.
The corporate guarantees that it could pace up a group’s understanding of a brand new codebase by 50% and save corporations weeks of worker time that may in any other case be spent writing documentation.
The corporate’s seed funding spherical was led by GV, with participation from Y Combinator and “over a dozen early-stage and angel traders.”
“We invested in Driver early given our pleasure in regards to the founders and the novel use circumstances of generative AI they’re addressing with a big untapped market alternative,” mentioned Luna Schmid, Companion at GV. “The founders have an unbelievable monitor document of constructing and convey in depth expertise and hard-earned classes from working with advanced codebases. We consider Driver is a recreation changer for any group that should doc sophisticated know-how shortly and guarantee it may be understood by all constituents.”
