Coder is an Austin, Texas-based company that has developed a cloud-based development suite, meaning you can write code in the browser and collaborate in real-time. Recently, Coder announced it raised $4.5 million in seed funding co-led by Uncork Capital and Redpoint Ventures. Founders Fund, Capital Factory, and several individual investors also participated in this round.
Interestingly, Coder was launched by three 20-year-olds: John A. Entwistle, Kyle Carberry, and Ammar Bandukwala. The three of them worked first started working together seven years ago when they were barely teenagers, according to Crunchbase. And they raised the funding by “cold emailing” potential investors at venture capital firms.
How did the company start? Entwistle was 13 years old when he was running a game server company from his parents’ house in New York. Then Entwistle connected with Carberry — who was in Saskatoon, Canada — when he decided he needed help from an engineer.
“We had more users, and after about three to four months, we were generating $10,000 a month in revenue, and as kids, we got extremely excited about everything,” said Entwistle via Crunchbase. “As things continued to grow, we realized we needed a system architect to manage all the servers.”
Then they hired Bandukwala — who was based out of Alabama — when he was age 12 following a few Skype conversations. From there, the team spent the next few years building DDoS mitigation platforms and was seeing websites with over one million monthly visitors.
As the three of them created companies and websites, they started questioning why they were writing code on their hard drive even though the repositories and products were on the cloud. And there weren’t any good solutions at the time.
After they graduated from high school in 2016, the three of them decided to launch Coder. Initially, they considered setting up shop in New York or California. But they decided that those locations were too expensive so they ended up settling in Austin, Texas. Even though the original motivation was based on the financials, they also found that the culture in Austin was “unbeatable.”
