Rork
Rork is an AI-powered platform that generates native mobile applications from natural-language prompts, allowing users to build and publish iOS and Android apps without writing code.3 Founded in 2024 by Daniel Dhawan and Levan Kvirkvelia, the company launched publicly on February 12, 2025, and within months became one of the most widely used AI platforms for mobile app development by web traffic.4 Rork has raised $17.8 million in total disclosed funding across two rounds, a $2.8 million pre-seed led by a16z Speedrun in May 2025 and a $15 million seed led by Left Lane Capital in April 2026.12
Founding and early history
Daniel Dhawan and Levan Kvirkvelia founded Rork in 2024 after each had independently bootstrapped three prior startups, beginning in their teens.1 Dhawan, who studied at the Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology, had previously scaled mobile apps to top App Store rankings in multiple countries.104 Kvirkvelia, based in Tbilisi, Georgia, built what became Russia's largest educational app, reaching over two million users as a teenager.4 Before Rork, the pair co-created 21st.dev, an open-source React UI component registry that attracted 50,000 users and 3,000 GitHub stars, and was named the number-one Product Hunt Product of the Month.6
The company's original product was a Cursor-like AI coding tool aimed at non-technical users for web development.1 When Lovable, a competing AI web-coding startup, launched and went viral, Dhawan and Kvirkvelia recognized they could not differentiate on web.1 Kvirkvelia proposed pivoting to mobile app generation, an area the founders knew well from their prior careers and one that Kvirkvelia described as "like 10 times more complicated" than web development.1 They rebuilt the product around React Native and Expo, the same frameworks used by Discord, Shopify, and Coinbase, and launched the same day that competitor Bolt released its own mobile coding product.17
At the time of launch, the founders were nearly out of money.1 Each had accumulated $15,000 in credit card debt paying for AI compute costs out of pocket, and Dhawan was sleeping on a mattress in a friend's apartment in San Francisco while attending the Founders, Inc. program.1 Their only outside capital at that point was a small angel check from Matt Shumer, co-founder and CEO of OthersideAI.1
Viral growth and pre-seed funding
Rork launched on February 12, 2025, with a single tweet from the founders.1 The initial post circulated modestly, but on February 24, Shumer posted on X that he considered Rork superior to Bolt, including a video demonstration.1 The post accumulated over one million views and caused an immediate spike in signups.1
Within fifteen minutes of Shumer's post, Austen Allred invested $100,000.1 By the end of that day, Founders, Inc. and Hustle Fund's Elizabeth Yin had committed capital, and warm introductions to other investors were arriving rapidly, totaling approximately $350,000 in commitments on the first day alone.1 Within five days of the viral tweet, Rork had generated $100,000 in revenue.1
The pre-seed round closed at $2.8 million, led by Andreessen Horowitz's Speedrun program.5 Additional investors included ChapterOne, Founders, Inc., Hustle Fund, Expo co-founders Charlie Cheever and Evan Bacon, React Native contributors Christopher Chedeau (Meta) and Marc Rousavy (Margelo), Nikita Shamgunov (Neon), Matteo Franceschetti (Eight Sleep), and Siqi Chen (Runway).5 Andrew Chen, the general partner running a16z Speedrun, moved quickly to secure the deal after learning Dhawan already had a competing term sheet from another firm.1 Two months after the viral tweet, the two-person team had reached $550,000 in annual recurring revenue.1
The company name references Howard Roark, the protagonist of Ayn Rand's novel The Fountainhead, whom the founders describe as "an individualistic contrarian architect who built great skyscrapers with sunlit windows in New York while everyone was building dark classic European buildings."5
Products
Rork offers two product tiers, Rork Pro and Rork Max, each targeting different use cases and technical depths.7
Rork Pro, priced between $25 and $100 per month, generates cross-platform applications using React Native and Expo that run on iOS, Android, and the web.7 Users describe their app in plain English, and the platform produces working code including UI components, navigation, state management, and API integrations.6 The generated apps can integrate with Supabase, Firebase, OpenAI, and RevenueCat for payments, and the code can be exported to GitHub for further development in external editors.7 A companion mobile app for Rork Pro launched in September 2025.4
Rork Max, available at $200 or more per month, builds native SwiftUI applications for the Apple ecosystem, including iPhone, iPad, Apple Watch, Apple TV, Vision Pro, and iMessage.7 It runs cloud-hosted Macs loaded with Xcode and the full iOS SDK; when a user sends a prompt, an AI agent writes SwiftUI code, compiles it, reads any errors, fixes them, and rebuilds until the app compiles cleanly.8 The resulting preview streams to the user's browser over a low-latency protocol, and users can install apps directly on a connected iPhone without a developer account or Xcode installation.8 Rork Max supports platform-specific features including widgets, Live Activities, Dynamic Island, Siri intents, ARKit, HealthKit, HomeKit, 3D games via SceneKit, and augmented reality experiences.7 The product is powered by Claude Opus 4.6 and allows two-click submission to the App Store.48
The Rork Max launch generated over eight million views on X and doubled the company's annual recurring revenue within two weeks.4 Pro subscribers receive five free Rork Max uses per week.7
Seed round and acquisition
On April 9, 2026, Rork announced a $15 million seed round led by Left Lane Capital, with participation from Peak XV Partners, True Ventures, Goodwater Capital, existing investor a16z Speedrun, Mento VC, and Karman Ventures.23 The round brought total disclosed funding to approximately $17.8 million.4
Left Lane Capital Managing Partner Matthew Miller said mobile commands over $160 billion in annual consumer spending and five trillion hours of global attention, calling it "the most valuable surface area on the planet."3
Shortly after the seed round, Rork completed its first acquisition, purchasing Paperline, a macOS application that builds native Swift applications with AI.3 The deal brought Paperline's founding engineers, Evgenii M. and Maksim Konstantinov, onto the Rork team, strengthening the company's native Swift development capabilities.4 Dhawan indicated the company would remain acquisitive to bring in engineering talent.4
Traction and user community
By early 2026, Rork ranked in the top two of the App Store's Developer Tools category globally and had become the number-one referral source to RevenueCat, the leading mobile subscription analytics provider.4 Over 100,000 people had used the platform to prototype or build mobile apps as of May 2025.5 The company reached approximately $440,000 in revenue during 2025 while operating with a team of roughly four people.4
Early users include a range of non-technical builders.5 George Lampropoulos, an eighteen-year-old college freshman with no coding experience, built Wrestle AI on Rork in about a month and earned $131,863 in total revenue over six months, with monthly revenue reaching $39,400 including annual subscriptions.9 His total spend on the project was approximately $1,100.9 Other users cited by the company include a cancer doctor who built a clinical dosage-calculation app, a musician with 80,000 followers who created an app for capoeira students to avoid paying $50,000 to development agencies, and agencies using the tool to complete client projects faster.5
Dhawan described the company's long-term vision as helping "the next 100M non-technical people make a living online by solving their own problems," noting that before AI there were only about 50 million software engineers worldwide who could ship production-quality software.5
References
- Rork Raises $15M to Power the Next Generation of App Store Entrepreneurs -- PR Newswire(accessed Apr 17, 2026)
- Rork: $15 Million Raised For AI Mobile App Creation Platform -- Pulse 2.0(accessed Apr 17, 2026)
- Rork Raises $15 Million In Seed Funding Round -- Tech Company News(accessed Apr 17, 2026)
- Announcing Rork -- Daniel Dhawan(accessed Apr 17, 2026)
- Rork -- Build mobile apps with AI, no code -- Founders, Inc.(accessed Apr 17, 2026)
- Rork FAQ -- Frequently Asked Questions(accessed Apr 17, 2026)
- Rork Max -- The best way to build mobile apps(accessed Apr 17, 2026)
- 18yo Made $131K in 6 Months with Rork(accessed Apr 17, 2026)
- Rork -- Russian-Origin Tech Company -- russiantech.co(accessed Apr 17, 2026)