How Crafting.dev is Giving AI Agents the Keys to Real Infrastructure

Hey, everyone. Welcome back here to Techstrong TV. Um, my next guest is Sumeet Va- Vaidya.

Sumeet is the CEO and one of the founders of Crafting, and, he's here to talk to us about their announcement around seed funding and launching their agent, or, or their platform for agents. Sumeet, welcome to Techstrong TV. It's great to have you on.

Thank you, Alan. It's great to be here. Well, it's exciting times for you, I'm sure, right?

Having started a couple of businesses myself in the... over the years, it's, you know, it's kind of like buying a boat. You know what they say about buying a boat, right?

The best two days are the day you s- buy it and the day you sell it. Um, starting a company is exhilarating, right? It, it, it, it almost you...

As the, as a founder, you're- y- you give it sort of the mother's milk of what it needs to survive, right? You breathe life into it. And then, you know, we all want our companies to do well, and, and well can be financially do well, you know, or in many different ways.

But, you know, it's part of, it's part of that life cycle, the circle of life, if you will. But Sumeet, give us an idea of what you've been doing up until, you know, founding Crafting and being involved in that. What, what's your career been like?

Sure. 0 to one of the juggernauts in the industry. Uh, later joined Uber, was managing a bunch of different teams over there, ranging from international growth to some of the micro-mobility stuff.

Again, saw growing pains, scaling engineering organizations. And then most recently before Crafting, I was an engineering director at Discord, working on a lot of things ranging from communities, developer platforms, and everything in between. Very cool.

Well, those are certainly some Silicon Valley blue blood names, right? Sumeet, over the years, I mean, in addition to founding a couple of companies, I've interviewed and done partnership deals with literally hundreds of, of founders. I- it's not something that you take on lightly.

It's something that you feel driven to do. Passion, even. What was the passion for you in, in founding Crafting?

Yeah. So, when I was considering my next steps after I was leaving Discord, one of the things that had been bothering me for a while was consistent challenges I've seen for engineers, specifically at enterprise organizations. There's certain challenges you run into when scaling, coordinating with a bunch of other teams, dealing with all these different dependencies and these complex architectures.

Uh, and I, I met my co-founder, Yisui. He actually was a tech lead at Google, VMware, been an industry veteran for a long time, and we've both seen the same challenges play out over and over and over again. And it was something that we both cared about, but nobody had really been solving.

We'd seen friends build this at Airbnb, Uber, Google, and a bunch of other places, and we figured that it was time that somebody actually built a solution that worked generally for everyone and bring the best in class tooling you see at the best tech companies to everybody else. I love it. Kinda like bringing the Amazon experience to everyone, right?

That, that's what they used to say about AWS back in the day, right? Yeah. Get that Amazon infrastructure.

Yep. Um, so talk to us about founding... So you, you, you said you want to bring this to everyone else.

You want... You know, people out here w- I'm sure there's plenty of them who are thinking about starting their own companies, es- especially today with AI and job displacement. " Uh, talk to us about, you know, kind of what you and your co-founder went through in building Crafting.

Yeah. So I think for us, it was a bit different from what a lot of people are looking at today, where there's a hard problem around making infrastructure accessible and available to lots of teams that candidly a lot of people weren't trying to solve, and those who were were doing it very specifically for a given company. So we spent a lot of time really digging in to understand how do you provide best in class tooling that is cloud provider agnostic and now agent provider agnostic.

And I think the flip for us was how do we solve the hard problem of infrastructure and then make it accessible for engineers and then agents? Whereas today, I think a lot of people are starting from, "Hey, here's something we could do for agents. Let's start with that," and then try and back into the infrastructure problems and unique challenges they're facing.

So there's a lot of excitement that's here, but I think what makes things sustainable and a healthy business is figuring out what is the hard work you're doing that other people are unwilling to do or would be too hard for them, especially when AI tools make it so easy to, you know, get a website up and running pretty quickly. To say the least, right? Um, so, well, you know, I didn't even ask you, when did, when did you guys start with Crafting?

Like, you know, I mean, officially it... I know it's seed funding now and launch, but, like, how long have you been working on this? So I've been working on it for almost a couple years now, and my co-founder, Yisui, was working on it for a year or two before that.

He was exploring different options, building out infrastructure, taking the knowledge that he had built at Google and VMware and trying to figure out how to make it universal. And when I first chatted with him, he was looking for a co-founder who he could work with, someone who was technical but also understands what these engineering organizations are dealing with. Um, I don't wanna name any names, but companies I've been at and companies friends have been working at, I've been trying to talk about the value of having really high quality developer tooling, especially for complex architectures, and a lot of companies don't...

They don't get it because they don't know how much better things could be. " You know, that's a pretty common fact pattern I've seen with founders is oftentimes the problem they're solving is a problem they themselves had, and then they come to the realization of, "We're not the only ones with this problem. " But, you know, it, it's interesting how the pendulum swings, Sumit, because if you go back to like, let's say, you know, peak COVID times, 2020 into 2021, hiring engineering talent was d**n near impossible.

The, the m- the money you were paying for coders and, you know, technical folk, and it, it got beyond the money 'cause they could get paid as much money virtch- I mean, you were paying coders 300, 400, $500,000. But then they wanted to get some, you know, freedom, creative freedom, if you will, like we're all in the Hollywood or something, and they wanted to have a say in picking the tools they use because after all, they're the ones using the tools. They know what is quality and what's garbage.

And you know, I spoke to a lot of CIOs, CTOs, chief product office, chief development officers, chief data officers, and, and at least back then, the feeling was, "Hey, I'm paying these guys a small fortune. If, you know, if, if they're really that good, we should be using the tools they say to use," right? Because they're the ones on the front line, and they're the w- the high performers.

And so of course we wanna give our high performers the best tools to, to make it happen. But somewhere along the line we lost that, it seems, right? Sometime, I guess, when we said you gotta start working back in the office, not at home anymore, and, you know, the pendulum, the leverage swung.

And oh, by the way, coder, you do what... Use the tools we want, otherwise we'll just replace you with AI or something. You know what I mean?

The, the, the, the leverage here has, has swung back to the upper management who then makes the choice on what tools you're gonna use, what platforms we'll use, and I get why, don't get me wrong. I'm not, not here banging anyone for it. But we've certainly seen, I think, a reduced role for the engineer, for the coder, for the doer, the jobber, getting to pick their own tools.

I might push back on that a little bit. Go ahead. That's why I asked it.

I don't- Yeah ... the last thing we want is violent agreement, right? Yeah.

So I think that the top-down direction is more about the overall vision and what they're trying to do. So what we're seeing in a lot of companies right now is execs and founders and investors pushing for, "You must use these AI tools," right? I think that's the most obvious one that everyone's dealing with today.

Yeah, yeah. " I think at the end of the day, the engineers still have control over what tools they use, but the execs are the ones who are driving the outcomes that engineers need to deliver on. " But over the past couple years, everyone's saying, "Well, AI is fundamentally changing everything.

You have to use it. We should see efficiency gains. " And I think a lot of companies are, are chasing a vision that has been sold to them, but a lot of them haven't been able to realize it, to be honest.

And I think we have something that addresses that, but there's a lot of tools out there that are making very lofty promises that haven't really been met. Yeah. A- and that again, you know what?

That's another mistake that, like, maybe first time entrepreneurs make, right? Is the, the overpromise, underdeliver. Uh, you know, I'm not saying be humble or don't say, you know, don't, don't let anybody know the full extent of it.

But the problem is, is when you overpromise something, you overhype it, I mean, you can fool some of the people some of the time, right? But you can't fool them all the time, and then once, once they feel like you overpromised and underdelivered, it's hard to get a, a second chance, right? You only get one- Absolutely ...

first chance. Yeah. I, I think we- I agree ...

take this to heart, at Crafting right now too. So one of the things that we try to do is we believe we have a best in class solution. " But that's a pretty lofty sell, and one thing we try to do for every single one of our customers, we say, "Hey, join us.

Do a free pilot. Take a couple months. " And we help them understand, "If you wanna remove us, it takes 10 seconds to rip our, our agent out, and you're good, and we don't have access to anything.

" And we've actually done heads-up pilots with a lot of other competitors, and things have gone well Good. Let's talk a little bit more about Crafting, though. Let's dive into it, right?

So it, it's a platform, right? That allows AI agents to validate code against real production dependencies. Sounds good, but translate that for our audience, Sumeet.

Yeah. So let's start with the original vision, right? So for, for Crafting, originally we built it for engineers.

You have a lot of engineers who are trying to build things in complex organizations. Uh, this meant that they needed ways to actually test things against real data, against real services. And so the first version of Crafting provided that for engineers.

We powered the end-to-end experience for coding, iterating, getting feedback, sharing and collaborating with stakeholders, and then validating things before they went live. Agents need the same things, and so today you see a lot of people talk about these agent sandboxes, but they just kind of enclose these agents in a safe little space, but the agents can't actually do anything. And the second challenge is that agents are producing so much code today, and a lot of the biggest companies today are dealing with this backlog, this bottleneck of all this code that's been generated, but they have no idea of how to say, "Okay, it's good.

" And so with Crafting for Agents, we tried to take that infrastructure we made available for engineers and make it available for agents, where now you can have an agent actually validate changes from AI-generated code against real third-party services, your internal tech stack, and basically spin up just in time whatever part of your tech stack you need to actually run and validate instead of relying on some, you know, local scripts or tests. Um, there's a broader vision for this around agent capabilities that we can kind of get into, but that's more of the midterm thinking. I love it.

Um, I, I mentioned you guys announced seed funding, but we never really gave details. You know, and, and look, our audience is not the finance audience. We know that, but still give them an idea what, you know, about funding and because it gives legitimacy, right?

If people are willing to write checks, as they say. For sure. Um, so we raised our seed round.

We've got investment led by Mischief and Wonderco, both of which are really solid funds and have been great partners for us. We also have a lot of angel investors on our cap table, including, you know, the founder of Dagster, the founding CTO of Dropbox, former VPs of engineering from Airbnb. So really it's people who understand the technical challenges these organizations are facing, especially as we go through this evolution of AI agents kind of taking over.

Yeah. Yeah. So look, I, I...

there's not a doubt in my mind of AI agents taking over at this point. We, we're living it here every day, and we're hardly cutting edge, though we do cover the cutting edge. Um, what do you see?

I mean, sometimes, you know, you c- one can breathe their own exhaust fumes. You know what I mean? Yeah.

Read their own press releases and reviews. But, you know, as you sit back and you see sort of the rise of agentic kind of, you know, cascading through the, the system, what do you, what do you see? So we've actually seen this with a lot of our partners, where they went from single-digit percentages of their code were written by AI to upwards of 70% over the past year.

There's been a dramatic acceleration and increase of adoption of these AI tools. Um, we're seeing a lot more code being generated, and companies we're talking to that we haven't partnered with yet are running into this problem of they don't know how to deal with this bottleneck that I was mentioning earlier. Um, companies we partner with have actually been able to deal with that bottleneck a bit, so they're seeing pretty good increases in throughput.

So I think, one thing we're consistently seeing is 25% increases in shipping PRs after a single quarter. So the acceleration is there. The adoption is there.

Um, there is this question of what does it mean for engineers and how they play nicely with agents, and how agents play nicely with engineers, and what collaboration looks like. Um, but yeah, the adoption is definitely real across the industry. So Sumeet, I don't know if you're familiar with the book "The Goal" by Goldratt.

Sis... So "The Goal" was, like, required reading in MBA classes in the '90s, even maybe the '80s. Actually, Gene Kim's "The Phoenix Project" is actually based on "The Goal," but "The Goal" introduced what they call the theory of constraints, right?

Which is... and, and it was more in a manufacturing context than, let's say, software context. But, but, but parallels are the same, is that, you know, you run into a bottleneck, and you overcome that bottleneck, and then what, what you didn't see over the horizon is the next bottleneck, the next constraint, and the constraint after that.

And a lot of... and I'm... you know, I see us running into that, n- and by us, I mean as an industry, as a market, is that, you know, all of a sudden, not only are we having 60, 70% of our code being generated by, by agent or by AI, but the sheer volume of code is through the roof, right?

It's two X, three X, four X the amount of code we were generating. So it's, it's majority generated by AI, but a lot more of it, and that, that moves the, that moves us to the next bottleneck. The bottleneck is no longer generating code.

The bottleneck is the governance of it. The bottleneck is the testing of it. The bottleneck is the deploying and monitoring and observing it, right?

These are all bottlenecks over the next couple horizons, right? Now, it sounds like Crafting is a bottleneck remover, right? At some level, right?

You're, you're-So as you look over the horizon, what, what other bottlenecks do you see Crafting kind of tackling, if you will? Yeah. A-and to build on your point really quickly before I answer that, I think the bottlenecks we tend to not see as an industry are generally ones of scale and maturity, right?

Yeah. It's easy for us to figure out what are the challenges we're facing as an individual developer, right? Like, OpenClaus has been great.

Let me get this agent up and running. Am I using a sandbox or a Mac Mini? Um, but things fundamentally change when you have dozens, hundreds, thousands of agents running simultaneously, when you're dealing with payment processing, when you're dealing with PII.

So the way we're looking at it is what would the most sophisticated companies or the ones with the most complex needs end up facing the next couple years? So to your question about removing those bottlenecks, right? Uh, the first one is validation, which is the main use case that we're actually working with our partners on.

So we got, you know, Brex, Faire, Instabase, Verkada, Persona, and like other large companies that have very serious data they're processing, really interested in what we're building, and we're partnering with them to actually ship our validation for them. And so the first step is remove this bottleneck by making it so that AI-generated code can be validated efficiently at scale using these AI tools, using real infrastructure. But what's next, to your question?

Once you have the ability to ship all of this code autonomously, you have this closed loop development that doesn't require a human to review every single thing, now all of a sudden you're delivering on the promise of, okay, we can move a lot faster. So then the next step is how can agents be a bit more proactive? " They'll message you in Slack and say, "You should look into this.

You might want to investigate this. " The next step is actually this agent saying, "Hey, I saw this issue in production. I generated this PR.

I tested it against shadow production traffic. " So it starts acting more like a teammate, and you can imagine that as you have these capabilities added for either access to infrastructure or access to internal data or third-party providers, they can do so much more, and that's when they start actively acting like teammates. Agreed.

Very cool. Sumit, we're almost out of time. You know, we mentioned Crafting a number of times, but we-- I don't think we mentioned the website.

Yes. dev and reach out to us from there too. That's C-R-A-F-T-I-N-G dot dev.

That's correct. Very cool. Sumit, look, it's heady times, you know?

And, and, I wish you guys nothing but success. Come back, keep us posted. It's in, you know, so much exciting stuff going on, and it seems like you're right in the middle of it, so- Yes ...

it should be a great ride. Appreciate it, Alan. Thank you so much for having me on.

My pleasure. We're gonna take a break here on Techstrong TV. dev, right?

That's right. Check it out. We'll be right back.