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Woz raises $6M seed - led by Cervin Ventures YC W25 - "Your AI Technical Cofounder" Golden State Warriors' Lacob family backs the round Founded by two MIT roommates of 13 years App factory, not toy factory - production apps to the store Woz raises $6M seed - led by Cervin Ventures YC W25 - "Your AI Technical Cofounder" Golden State Warriors' Lacob family backs the round Founded by two MIT roommates of 13 years App factory, not toy factory - production apps to the store
Woz logo
Woz Inc. - San Francisco. The cofounder that never sleeps, never quits, and ships on a Tuesday.
YC W25 Seed - $6M San Francisco

Woz.

// your ai technical cofounder

Describe an app in plain English. Woz builds it, tests it, ships it to the store - and keeps it running.

The Dispatch

Somewhere in San Francisco, an app is shipping itself.

It's a Tuesday, and a founder who has never written a line of code just typed a sentence: "I need a booking app with payments and chat." No standup. No sprint board. No frantic search for a technical cofounder who might, if the equity is right, deign to return the call. The sentence goes in. Somewhere behind it, a fleet of AI agents wakes up, divides the labor, and starts building - frontend, backend, hosting, database - while a human engineer keeps a hand on the wheel. That is Woz, and it is quietly rearranging who gets to build software.

Woz (YC W25) calls itself an AI technical cofounder. The phrase is doing a lot of work. It is not a chatbot that spits out snippets, and it is emphatically not - the founders will interrupt you here - another no-code tool for demos and toy apps. It is closer to a factory: a system that designs, codes, tests, deploys, and maintains entire applications, then walks them all the way to the app store. The idea that "I have an idea" might be the only technical skill a person needs is either naive or inevitable. Woz is betting on inevitable.

"Woz is NOT another no-code tool for generating prototypes, demos, or 'toy apps.'" - Woz, on its own launch page
$6M
Seed Round
W25
YC Batch
2
MIT Founders
13yrs
Building Together
The Product

A cofounder in the cloud, minus the equity negotiation.

Traditional no-code platforms hand you a prototype and wish you luck. Woz picks up where they stop - taking a plain-English brief through the full product lifecycle. The pitch is simple enough to fit on a napkin, and detailed enough to make an engineering team nervous.

01

Say it in English

Describe the app you want - features, payments, chat, whatever the business needs. No spec docs, no tickets.

02

Agents build it

Specialized AI agents handle discrete steps - frontend, backend, hosting, database - like stations on an assembly line.

03

Humans check it

When an agent hits a snag, a human engineer steps in. Every app gets a real quality review before it ships.

End To End

From sentence to App Store, without hiring anyone.

1
Design
Plain English brief
2
Code
AI agents build
3
Test
Human review
4
Deploy
Hosting + store
5
Maintain
Ongoing updates

The Contrarian Bet

The "anti-vibe-coding" company.

"Vibe coding" - letting an AI improvise its way to a working demo - is fast, fun, and famously fragile. Woz's argument is that a demo is not a business. Rather than handing the AI unlimited freedom, Woz sets clear tasks, processes, and guardrails, then keeps humans in the loop to correct course. CEO Ben Collins compares it to a manufacturing assembly line: an AI app factory where the automation is real but the quality control is human.

"Vibe coding tools are great for quickly testing ideas, but moving toward sustainable, production-ready applications requires technical expertise." - Injil Muhamad, co-founder & CEO, Boddle Learning

It is a pointed position in a market crowded with tools that stop at the prototype. Bubble, Lovable, and the rest let you test an idea; Woz wants to run the whole thing - deployment, cloud hosting, app-store publication, and the unglamorous maintenance that keeps software alive after launch day.

The Founders

Two roommates, thirteen years, one thesis.

Ben Collins and Brad Eckert met as roommates at MIT thirteen years ago and have been building at the edge of AI/ML ever since. The team is small and senior - ML scientists and production engineers who have spent roughly a decade together scaling products to millions of users.

Co-founder & CEO

Ben Collins

Leads Woz's vision of the "AI app factory" - automation paired with human expertise. Frames the company as building apps businesses can actually trust.

Co-founder

Brad Eckert

Previously co-founded Cairns Health (YC S17), where he led an engineering team of 30+ and built an LLM-enabled device aimed at curing chronic insomnia.

The Money

$6 million to build apps businesses can trust.

In October 2025, Woz announced a $6M seed round led by Cervin Ventures. The cap table has a sporting twist: alongside the venture firms sits the Lacob family, co-owners of the NBA's Golden State Warriors.

Cervin Ventures - Lead Burst Capital Y Combinator Untapped Ventures MGV Lacob Family (GS Warriors)
The Record

How it happened.

~2012

Ben Collins and Brad Eckert meet as roommates at MIT and start building AI/ML projects together.

2017

Brad co-founds Cairns Health (YC S17), leading a 30+ engineering team on an LLM-enabled health device.

Feb 2025

Woz launches publicly through Y Combinator's W25 batch as "Your AI Technical Cofounder."

Oct 2025

Woz announces a $6M seed round led by Cervin Ventures to accelerate product and hiring.

Who It's For

The person with the idea, not the team.

Woz is aimed at small business owners, entrepreneurs, side hustlers, creators, and consultants - the people who have a product in their head and no engineering department to build it. The roadmap points beyond mobile: web apps, TV apps, IoT software, AR/VR, and eventually regulated sectors like healthcare and insurance.

Curiosities & footnotes

  • The founders were MIT roommates for 13 years before Woz.
  • Investors include the co-owners of the Golden State Warriors.
  • Woz describes itself as an "AI app factory" - an assembly line for software.
  • Brad once built an LLM-enabled device aimed at curing chronic insomnia.
  • Ships wozcode, a Claude Code plugin claiming ~50% lower token cost.

The Return

Back to that Tuesday.

The booking app is live now. It takes payments, it has a chat, and it sits in the app store next to products that took teams of engineers and rounds of funding to ship. The founder who typed one sentence never opened a code editor, never scheduled a standup, never learned what a merge conflict is. The gap between having an idea and holding a real product - the gap that used to swallow whole companies - closed while they were making coffee.

That is the quiet rearrangement Woz is after. Not faster prototypes. Not prettier demos. A world where the technical cofounder is a service you can rent by the sentence, and where the only thing standing between a person and a shipped business is knowing what they want to build. Whether that world arrives on schedule is an open question. Woz, $6 million in and building on a Tuesday, is not waiting to find out.

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