A seed round by Ithaca, New York-based software firm Mintlify has raised $2.8 million led by Bain Capital Ventures. The startup uses artificial intelligence to automate software documentation. CEO and co-founder Han Wang says the funds will go to product development and hiring that will increase the company’s small staff. Mintify was launched in 2021 by Wang and Hahnbee Lee, a pair of software engineers who were driven to address a pressing industry need: quality documentation. A 2017 survey by GitHub found that 93 percent of developers listed incomplete or outdated documentation as an industry-wide problem.

“We’ve worked as software engineers at companies in all stages ranging from startups to Big Tech and found that they all suffer from bad documentation, if it even existed at all,” Wang told TechCrunch.

“Documentation is the lifeline for junior engineers and those jumping into new codebases,” Wang said. “It helps senior devs save time from explaining their code to others in the future. For public-facing and open-source products, documentation has a direct impact on user adoption.”

Mintlify’s technology reads code, then has AI write docs to explain it through a combination of natural language and web scraping.

And as with all ideas whose times have come, Mintlify is getting some competitors. Documatic, for example, leverages AI to generate changelogs and other instruction sets, in addition to basic documentation. Wang tells TechCrunch Mintlify is set apart by a mission “to solve documentation rot by developing continuous documentation into a standard practice for software teams.”

In addition to Bain, seed investors include TwentyTwo Ventures and Quinn Slack, CEO and co-founder of Sourcegraph. “Wang previously co-launched Foodful, a startup that developed a cloud-based monitoring system for cows, and Pe•ple, an online customer community platform that was acquired by Tribe in early 2021,” reports TechCrunch, noting that “Lee was a co-founder at Pe•ple before briefly joining Duolingo as an engineer.”