Operative: Lovable meets Retool for internal APIs — web app code generation for enterprise internal tooling

so much. Congratulations. We'll have you back on sometime. $17 million series A. Let's go. Fantastic. Biggest round we've heard yet. Let's bring in the next guest. Operative are going the set of pit pipers. Welcome to the stream. How you doing? How's it going? Good to meet you. I'm John. Eric, nice to meet you guys.

Eric, good to meet you. You're going to want to keep those mics close to you because it is noisy here at YC Demo Day 2025. Good to meet you. Can you introduce and the company that you Awesome. Yeah. Uh we're we're operative. Uh I'm I'm Chris. I'm Chris Settles. This is my co-founder, Eric Kintania.

You can introduce yourself as well, but um we're we're friends from high school. We met at West Aurora High School in Aurora, Illinois in 2014. We were doing our first Java programming class together. Wow. Wow. And uh 10 years later, here we are. Deep deep. What What did you guys do between uh then and now? Yeah.

Do you want to tell other programming languages? Do you want to tell more of the story? Yeah. I mean, we went to college. Maybe you still write Java. I don't know. Yeah. We went to college, worked at a couple big tech companies, worked a couple Chris was at Uber. You can talk about that. There you go. Uh, nice.

Did you wear the Pit Vipers during your your main pitch? Sorry. Oh, you're asking the Sun. Did you wear them while you were pitching the the Oh, no. I just got these from Marco. I don't know. We saw Marco in here wearing these. We're like, Marco, you look so cool. So, break down the company. Yeah.

What are you guys doing? All right, so we're working on web app code generation for internal APIs.

So you can imagine having like a lovable plus a retool for your company where you can on demand just create any kind of application that you're thinking about whether it's like a new dashboard or it's some kind of like app to manage your airflow and you want to have a nice UI with it and you want to connect it to all these different pipelines.

I mean that's just one use case you can think about but you can build any kind of front-end application that connects to existing APIs that you have in your company.

Yeah, I remember like when you when you set up like a Django website you kind of get like the Django admin like like out of the box and you can just in in you know uh in investigate all the different classes that you've kind of defined in the database.

Uh what are some examples you could give us of these internal APIs that typically float around in companies or you can either give like a precise example or just a general example. Yeah. Do you want to give one? Yeah. I mean um a lot of the use cases are centered around like customer service.

So people like want to interact with like a database. People who are doing support want to uh want to like change like payments and stuff like that, data visualization, stuff like that. Okay.

So uh yeah, I mean it is it is it unique about like bringing different services together because a lot of like smaller companies would say you want to you want to look at the payments admin head over to your Stripe dashboard. Stripe's already built that. Where where are where are companies currently falling short?

Is it that they're they're not bringing the data together across services? Or is it that they're developing like like their own databases and their own their own tables that just don't have a don't have an API out of the box or don't have a don't have a web app in front of their API out of the box. Yeah. Yeah.

So as so definitely startups it's super easy to just say okay yeah check out the stripe dashboard manage and then that's what stripe does physical customer service flow it's like you you go to Shopify for this and then you go to the the CMS for this you go to Stripe if there's a problem over there and then you go payroll it's all SAS products yeah but one of the things like we we noticed especially at our our jobs in big tech is that eventually your product gets really complicated and you actually don't there's not a SAS product that those that those uh services offer and so you end up needing to build something on top of it in order to manage it and then you end up building needing to build all these different internal tools to like have all of that organized in a nice way where you can connect it all together because the traditional SAS doesn't uh support the features that you're looking for.

Got it. And so then as a result you hire a team to build out those kinds of applications and then spend a lot of money and that's what uh we're trying to bridge that. What was the aha moment for you guys?

Were you seeing the the kind of explosion of tools like lovable and things like that and then and then you saw wait why aren't people doing this internally or what what was the kind of moment that you guys decided to focus on this?

I mean I I think for us we saw like we launched this like lovable type product and we saw a lot of people from companies using it as a consumer product actually at first. Yeah. To build internal tools for their company. So we actually we were like oh we should just bring this directly B2B. Cool. Very cool.

Yeah, in some ways it makes sense being able to like quickly generate something, test it, and then like it's very different than sort of these like ephemeral products that exist and uh ultimately will need to be I don't know sometimes completely rebuilt. Uh talk about the go to market motion.

Uh it sounds like this is not a company where you need to sell to every other startup in YC. Uh who are you selling to? How are you actually convincing them to take the leap and go with you? Yeah.

So we're we're starting uh from the initial sort of traction we saw with the consumer product, we decided we want to work on this enterprise direction andor like larger organization direction uh because of these like use cases we saw with uh people signing up from all of their work emails and building apps.

Uh so we're starting some design partnerships with large organizations. I can't say I won't say the exact name. Um, and we're planning to kind of just leverage our our warm uh warm intro outbound network or warm intro network to be able to talk to some more organizations.

And I think like there's some uh like there's actually a large percentage of companies that even will try to use like retool to build uh internal apps. And so uh we like we think we can work with some of the other YC companies that are doing things like that using that and but maybe have you guys demo day.

Are you guys are you guys working with retool or you you you competing kind of competing in some sense of it? Good luck with talking smart but I good luck to market. Yeah, we have a pretty cool direction that's like pretty unique at least at the moment. So talk to me about the actual instantiation of the web app.

I'm sure you're using AI and code generation. What's working? what uh uh how much is uh are you leveraging 03 or claude or or open source or Gemini? What's uh what are you looking for? Where are the models falling short?

Where are you kind of like trying to stay ahead of the puck because everything's developing so quickly? You want to take it? Yeah. So, I think uh on the platform I think the foundation models provide like a nice foundation. Yeah. Um but like we try to leverage uh good tools.

So like viewing a file tree, we had a browser agent on top to test and validate the app. Okay.

Uh the model's far short in I think they're good at like going zero to one, but I think like if you go 0ero to one and then there's a bug, going back and finding what file it is, what's implicated in it, I think it's very hard for the models and it's better to just start over. Okay. Yeah.

Uh, have you benchmarked against how long it takes someone to build a web app for a on top of a private API using cursor and just saying I'm going to vibe code this myself versus your product because it feels like it's getting faster and faster and there's a lot of I mean there's like there's whole there's whole open source projects for like build out the API docs around an API just from you know this was programmatic this wasn't even uh this wasn't even AI you know you just have like oh you want to you want to put this you want to instantiate this as a blog Okay, here you go.

Um, uh, what are you benchmarking against? Yeah, actually, um, maybe a cool story like on the on the backtory of how we came across this is that we actually started with people wanting to develop apps like inside cursor.

And so one of the kind of unique insights we had is that uh today like it it require like developing any kind of like front end requires that you ask cursor for a prompt and then you open up the web page and go click on it and just verify that it looks how you want it to and you can go and like then tell cursor like okay I want to you know move the blue button inside the black box and you have to like just keep prompting it until it do does that.

So actually one thing Eric and I worked the first thing Eric and I worked on was like a actually an MCP tool. Oh yeah, that uh allows people to like opens up a browser agent that can go and view changes that a coding agent makes. Uh and it will it'll just test to see if the like visually if the app actually works.

Actually there's uh there's one of our users over there just giving us feedback on it. So we grew that to like around a thousand GitHub stars and so people got really excited about that.

But we wanted to bring those same tools into a product like Lovable or like Codegen and be able to have all of this code generation with testing built in. So that way we can allow users to like just go from prompt to a working web page without any interaction. Very cool. Are you guys still raising raising right now?

We're still raising. Uh we have uh we've been backed by weekend fund and also a few other angel investors. Um and we are we're still raising and open to with other investors. We have an angel investor and retool investor in us. So, um, play the hits. Play the hits. Play the hits.

Find something you love and just Do you have any metrics that you show that you shared here at demo day? Yeah. Uh, as I mentioned, we had the GitHub repo. We la we like scaled to 100 or sorry um, thousand a,000 stars. That's pretty good. We just launched the consumer product.

We had it got around 2500 different users building using operative to build apps. Crazy. Yeah, that's great. And right now there's like about a 4% conversion from free to pro plan. We have a pretty generous free tier. So you can go and use the app however you want.

But the for the the power users like there's around 4% of them converting. So we have about one 1. 5k monthly revenue at the moment. Amazing. And uh we're that's our as with the consumer product but uh we're planning to scale more uh revenue. You could probably get that on your first contract. Exactly.

Thank you for stopping by. Please enjoy your guys. Thank you so much. Have fun out there.