Why we invested in Sutro
Our portfolio company Sutro officially launched to the public today — and it also announced that it’s raised $2.2 million in funding led by Eniac Ventures. (Check out the fundraising deck on Business Insider.)
Sutro is led by an impressive pair of founders: CEO Owen Campbell-Moore, who was previously a Product Manager at both Facebook and Google (where he co-founded and led the Progressive Web Apps team), and Tomas Halgas, who worked on machine learning at Facebook and co-founded Sphere (acquired by Twitter).
Owen and Tomas have come up with a powerful idea, namely leveraging GPT-3 to build apps (web, mobile, and backend) in seconds. The key word here is leveraging — Sutro is not relying on GPT-3 to write the code itself, which would raise concerns around technical errors and plagiarism. Instead, it’s using GPT-3 to create a “product specification,” which Sutro needs to build a full app.
In other words, users can just describe the app they want to build in normal language. Sutro has trained GPT-3 to turn that language into the formal description it needs, then its own traditionally-engineered compiler stack can take the description and transform it into an app.
The company’s initial focus is helping non-technical founders build MVPs of consumer apps (for example, two non-technical sisters in the UK used it to build a marketplace where people can discover and book children’s classes, which is still in testing). But I can imagine this being used even more broadly in the future.
While the launch and funding announcement happened today, we actually invested in Sutro back in 2021. I’ve been thrilled to see all the progress they’ve made so far, and I can’t wait to see what people build with Sutro!
