vibe coding tool Creating an app has been made very easy. But almost no one is turning those apps into real businesses — and one South African start-up thinks it knows why.
HyperDev is an AI-powered software development tool that aims to address gaps in the Vibe coding market – such as business development and software integration – that other platforms aren't effectively tackling, according to Anton Moulder, its chief product officer.
The company said that despite AI tools providing non-technical users the ability to create complex websites and applications, the rate at which any of these are translated into viable businesses is relatively low.
“We can all type out a little prompt and say, 'Build me a website,' and you'll get a website that looks pretty impressive at first. However, I don't think anyone needs just one website. No one needs just another dashboard app, or to-do app, or e-commerce site — that's not the biggest hurdle for the average business owner,” Moulder told TechCentral in an interview last week.
“These websites and apps serve a purpose: They actually need to reach customers and make them money.”
Co-founded by Moulder with Piotr Sobolewski and Riaz Moola, hyperdev Uses a proprietary “guided mode” to help entrepreneurs build full-scale businesses through both the business development and technical creation aspects of the process.
Experience
Moulder has more than two decades of experience as a technology enterprise builder. He is the founder of
Business process expert in Many Hands and a managing partner in the Digital Product Center
Urbian. Meanwhile, Moolah worked on AI at the University of Cambridge, Oxford University and Google, where he worked on language modeling and recommendation algorithms as part of the search team. Sobolewski holds a PhD in AI from the Wrocław University of Science
Technology in Poland. Formerly at OpenAI, he was also part of the ChatGPT team.
When users first connect with HyperDev through their web-based portal, they are asked questions about the market they want to operate in, competitors, pricing, and other factors to help them determine the feasibility of their idea. According to Moulder, just because AI makes the manufacturing process cheaper doesn't mean everything is worth manufacturing.
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The market research part of the process is then complemented by technical formulation. Moulder said that while other Vibe coding tools help develop isolated pieces of working code, HyperDev takes an end-to-end perspective by guiding users through design, database setup, payments integration, security and deployment.
There are different guided pathways for different types of businesses, each built with contributions from experts in those fields as well as well-documented best practices that have been incorporated into the underlying AI models.
Whenever users get stuck during the development process, they raise a support ticket for a certified professional developer to intervene. Moulder calls this “dev in the loop”. The team plans to expand the range of support expertise beyond technical topics, so that users who are stuck with a marketing problem can connect with a marketer, and those who are stuck with a pricing problem can get equally relevant expertise.
“LLM and AI are utilities these days; the question is what are you doing on top of them. AI coding tools are bringing a lot of people into the app-building world who don't know what they don't know. But we think that in the long run, we'll still need humans. We'll eventually need some kind of human fallback,” Moulder said.
HyperDAVE isn't just for greenfield projects. Users with existing systems and platforms can import them into HyperDev and get help changing the architecture or adding new tools.
“Someone can bring in their old WordPress site and refresh it, add functionality and breathe new life into it,” Moulder said.
The platform is technology agnostic, giving users the option to host their applications in any environment they choose. HyperDAV cannot access user data once it is placed in any environment, such as a database. Moulder said there has been no deliberate effort to retain users on the platform, so solutions built using HyperDev can be extracted and deployed in other environments.
HyperDev's pricing structure includes a free tier that limits usage to one million tokens. The 'pay-as-you-go' option allows users to access more AI calculations while keeping control of their total spend. An auto-renewal option is also available for heavy users with larger budgets.
'It was never this easy'
“Some people want it, are happy with it, and have the budget. For them, speed is often more important than saving money. But for most people, we recommend they only add tokens when they need them,” Moulder said.
The web-based interface allows both text and voice input, and the memory is persistent – Moulder said this is important for building context, so the model improves as iterative signals are entered by the user.
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To date, HyperDev has raised US$1 million in seed funding and is in the midst of another round, though Moulder is careful not to over-indulge in capital.
“We don't want to waste too much of the Kool-Aid funding,” he said. “Launching something has never been easier, more possible, and cheaper for you.” — (c) 2026 NewsCentral Media
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