Software documentation – resources that explain how the software works and how to use it – has evolved dramatically over the past few decades. Once primarily in PDF or static plain text format, documentation today is much more interactive and user-friendly than ever before.
But building them still takes time, something developers and entrepreneurs Han Wang and Hahnbee Lee say they've personally struggled with.
“In the 2010s, companies like Stripe, Hashicorp, and Twilio raised the bar for developer content,” Wang said. “They proved that a truly great developer experience in content wasn't just a commodity, it was a competitive advantage. Every company has been trying to catch up ever since, but it's actually pretty hard.”
Wanting to simplify the workflow for publishing documentation (largely to make their own lives easier), Wang and Lee created Mintlify, a collection of documentation creation tools, including one that can auto-generate documentation from your codebase.
“The 2020s are seeing the bar rise again for documentation creation,” Wang said, “this time not just in the UI, but also in how developers and editors fundamentally interact with content, thanks to AI.”
AI-powered vision
Wang and Li met in college, when they both attended Cornell University, where Li was an undergraduate in computer science and Wang was working on a bachelor's degree in information science.
During his time as a student, Wang founded two companies: FoodFul, a system for remotely monitoring livestock, and People, a platform for building customer communities. After People, which Li helped found, was acquired by user engagement company Bettermode, Wang stayed on at the company for a few months before eventually becoming a partner at Bain Capital Ventures.
Wang left Bain in 2021, right around the time he and Li came up with the idea for Mintlify. They raised seed funding from Bain (using 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 create guides detailing their software or services, API references, SDK documentation, and chatbots (powered by OpenAI's APIs). It provides built-in components and templates for basic documentation formatting, and structures your documentation so that it can be embedded into your codebase.
Mintlify provides tools to create and manage documentation for your software, including tools to automatically update your documentation. Image credit: Mintlify
To help you maintain your documents, Mintlify periodically scans your “old” documents, detects how users engage with the content, and suggests ways to improve readability.
However, there have been criticisms of Mintlify's automation features.
Early user Tim Anderson of DevClass claims that Mintlify adds comments to the codebase that “add little value” and, in one instance, repeats the same factually incorrect statement four times in the documentation. Others point out that Mintlify can be confusing with disorganized, poorly optimized, or poorly written code.
While Wang emphasizes the potential of the platform's AI rather than its limitations, he suggests that humans can't be removed from the document creation loop entirely.
“From what we see, the role of content is changing with AI, with documentation automatically evolving in real time from support messages, codebase, and product feedback,” Wang says. “With the help of AI, companies will be able to automatically create technical content based on product changes and user feedback.”
Expanding business
Mintlify isn't the only startup looking to reinvent the way developers create and publish tech guides.
Guidde uses AI to automatically generate software documentation videos. More in line with Mintlify's efforts, Documatic automatically generates change logs and explanations from code in addition to documentation.
When I mentioned the rival to Wang, he responded by highlighting Mintlify's pretty impressive client list, which includes around 3,000 brands, including Anthropic, Cursor, Perplexity, Zapier, Polymarket, and Fidelity. (Wang estimates that Mintlify's tools reach more than 1.5 million developers each month.)
He also hinted at adding differentiating features to the Mintlify platform in the near future.
“Every document should have an AI chat to answer questions directly, but it will go much deeper,” Wang says. “Content creation will also change. Content will be used to power support, chatbots, and the generative AI models themselves. Content will be personalized for each 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 will join Mintlify's board of directors as part of the deal.) This brings Mintlify's total funding to $21.7 million, and Wang says the new money will be used to expand Mintlify's 11-person team and product development.
“Our company has always focused on lean and efficient operations,” Wang said. “Although we didn't need to raise capital, we made a strategic decision to do so to fuel our further growth.”
Wang declined to answer questions about Mintrify's revenue and profitability.