🚢 Onboard AI

YC-backed Onboard AI that lets you chat with your codebase of up to 10 repos to locate and understand functionality, diagnose bugs, generate complex code changes and more.

🏃🏻 Rundown

founder story/problem/market-fit

The founders of Onboard AI were inspired by the frustrations software developers face when dealing with complex and poorly documented code. This led them to envision an AI solution that can chat with any codebase via a GitHub link, eliminating tech debt, streamlining code understanding, and making coding more efficient and enjoyable. Their goal is to revolutionize the way developers work with code repositories. 

• SooHoon Choi - 4+ years of experience, former Microsoft

• Daksh Gupta - 3+ years of experience, former Amazon

• Vaishant Kameswaran - 4+ years of experience, former Amazon and Hubspot

🧐 core business model

• SaaS/Subscription Model: Onboard.ai operates on a subscription model, offering three tiers of service. They maintain an impressive 78% customer retention rate with an 11% churn rate.

• 4 Growth Factors according to Blitzscaling:

  • Market Size

    • TAM = entire software market : $659B

    • SAM = entire enterprise software market: $280B

    • SOM = within 1 year, they should be able to capture 300 in enterprise sales, and 200k of customer SaaS sales.

  • Gross Margins: Not publicly stated, 85% is expected.

  • Distribution: 1-1 SaaS Onboarding(referrals make sense if the product is valuable). Distribution is not clear.

  • Network Effects: Onboard.ai relies on classical SaaS word-of-mouth for growth, rather than network effects.

• 2 Growth Limiters according to Blitzscaling:

  • Lack of Product-Market Fit (PMF): The idea is cool & loved by developers, but it is not clear how the product of interacting with a codebase is relevant to enterprise companies.

  • Operational Scalability: As they scale, their unit economics remain relatively little due to their model expenditure. Customer support and sales teams on B2B SaaS will have to be enhanced to comply with the needs of the developers.

AI competitive advantage

1. Model builders, model integrators, or vertical enterprise players? Model integrators. Onboard AI leveraged ChatGPT to tune a model coherent with codebase Q&A.

2. Data Strategy: As model integrators, they do not own their data. As the company scales, their model can get better and far more accurate, but they are reliant on the capabilities of the model builders, like OpenAI.

3. Direct access to customers? Yes!

why developers love it

Onboard.ai steps in as a real-time AI-powered assistant for developers. It enables seamless interaction with codebases, offering instant access to knowledge and assistance. With just a GitHub sign-in and repository name input, developers can harness AI to streamline their coding tasks.

• Simplification: Onboard.ai simplifies codebase understanding, enabling developers to locate and manipulate code efficiently.

• Data Privacy: All AI models and data stay securely within your cloud, ensuring data privacy and control.

• Empowering Developers: Onboard.ai empowers developers to work smarter, fostering productivity and collaboration.

why you will too!

•  🙏 Future Category King: Onboard.ai is a product-led SaaS. It distinguishes itself by offering a groundbreaking approach to codebase understanding. It empowers developers with real-time assistance and expertise, promoting efficiency and reducing the barriers to effective code management.

• 📈 Market Trend: Onboard.ai has the potential to secure a strong position in the software development AI market, where AI-driven codebase understanding is gaining traction as a fundamental requirement for the industry.

• ⬆️ Traction: Onboard.ai has already made significant strides with a robust client base. Their services are used by top developers around the world, and they've secured $1M million in Seed funding, underscoring investor confidence.