DhiWise takes the tedium out of programming

Programming involves a lot of monotonous tasks. Based in Gujarat, India, DhiWise wants to makes things less onerous for developers with its programming automation platform. The company, which won Product Hunt’s Golden Kitty award for Developer Tool of the Year last year, announced today it has raised $7 million in Series A funding led by Accel and Together Fund, with participation from India Quotient. The round also included participation from founders from companies including WebEngage, Fleetx and Rocketlane. This brings DhiWise’s total raised to about $9.5 million.

Founded in April 2021 by former IT consultants CEO Vishal Virani and CTO Rahul Shingala, DhiWise has been in beta phase during the past eight months and claims it has already saved more than one million hours of programming for its 30,000 users so far.

DhiWise co-founders Rahul Shingala and Vishal Virani

DhiWise’s platform converts designs into code along with data binding, authentication, run time permissions, authorizations and more, allowing developers to focus on business logic and core algorithms. It generates structured, readable and modular code in MVC and clean code that can be later built upon for scalability.

As Virani explained, “with each new app design, developers need to write code for UI and frontend developers need to work on data-binding to make applications dynamic, in general, in any app development, 60% of the time is just consumed by this mundane programming. DhiWise automates all this mundane programming through its platform where developers can feed inputs in minutes to generate hours of source code. DhiWise’s smart algorithms convert all metadata given by users on the platform to clean, readable and customizable code.”

Virani and Shingala worked together for eight years at an IT consultancy they founded with a team of 150 developers who built 200 projects for clients in 24 countries. During that time, they deployed low-code and no-code tools, including Figma-to-code conversion platforms. But their results did not have the required code quality and architecture, or had multiple dependencies on the tool it was built with.

“We had previously set up an IT consultancy, we built software products for North American companies and had taken the topline to over a million dollars,” Virani said. “There was one repeated pain point we experienced that propelled us to set up DhiWise. Developers aren’t able to realize their peak work potential because they spend too much time doing mundane tasks.”

He added that “typically, people just hire more developers to share this workload. But developer, not unlike oil, are a finite resource. You can’t keep throwing in valuable resources at things that technology can solve.”

Launching DhiWise involved six months of research and development and a team of more than 50 developers who came up with algorithms to automate the programming lifecycle while paying attention to the source code standards that allow developers to build upon the code later.

Virani said DhiWise’s main competitor is Anima Apps, but it differentiates by focusing on developer experience. “All other tools available today are limited to just automating design to code whereas DhiWise is laser-focused on automating all parts of the programming life cycle.”

The new investment will allow DhiWise to add features like importing design systems, auto-identification of reusable components from Figma designs and declarative UI in their upcoming releases. It will keep React and Flutter apps as the core of its value proposition.

In a pre-prepared statement, Together Fund founding partner Manav Garg said, “DhiWise’s vision of enabling the ~30 million professional devs today by embedding itself directly into their workflows and not requiring them to change their behavior is compelling.”