Vibe coding tools have made it trivially easy to build an app. But almost nobody is turning those apps into actual businesses — and a 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 are not tackling effectively, according to its chief product officer, Anton Moulder.
Despite AI tools giving non-technical users the ability to build complex websites and applications, the rate at which any of these are translated into viable businesses is relatively low, the company said.
“We can all type a little prompt and say, ‘Build me a website’, and you will get a first-shot website that looks very impressive. I don’t think anybody just needs a website, though. Nobody just needs another dashboard app, or to-do app or e-commerce site — that’s not the biggest hindrance 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 they must make money.”
Co-founded by Moulder with Piotr Sobolewski and Riaz Moola, HyperDev uses a proprietary “guided mode” to help entrepreneurs build full-scale businesses by taking them through both the business development and technical build aspects of the process.
Experience
Moulder has over two decades of experience as a tech venture builder. He is the founder of
business process specialist Many Hands and a managing partner at digital product hub
Urbian. Moola, meanwhile, worked on AI at the University at Cambridge, the University of Oxford and Google, where he worked on language modelling and recommendation algorithms as part of the Search team. Sobolewski holds a PhD in AI from Wrocław University of Science and
Technology in Poland. Formerly at OpenAI, he was also part of the ChatGPT team.
When users first engage with HyperDev through its 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 viability of their idea. According to Moulder, AI making the build process cheaper does not mean that everything is worth building.
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The market research portion of the process is then supplemented by the technical build. 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, payment integration, security and deployment.
There are different guided paths for different kinds of businesses, each built with contributions from experts in those fields alongside well-documented best practices that have been fed into the underlying AI model.
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 disciplines, so that users who are stuck on a marketing problem can engage with a marketer, and those stuck on a pricing problem can get equally relevant expertise.
“LLMs and AI are utilities these days; the question is what you are doing on top of them. AI coding tools are bringing so many people into the app-building world who don’t know what they don’t know. But we think for the longest time, we’re still going to need humans. We’re ultimately going to need some kind of human fallback,” said Moulder.
HyperDev is not only meant for greenfield projects. Users with existing systems and platforms can import them into HyperDev and get help with changing the architecture or adding new tools.
“Someone could bring their old WordPress site and refresh it, add functionality and breathe new life into it,” said Moulder.
The platform is technology agnostic, giving users the choice to host their applications in any environment they choose. HyperDev cannot access user data once it is housed in any environment it has spun up, such as a database. Moulder said there is no deliberate effort to keep users on the platform, so solutions built using HyperDev can be extracted and deployed into other environments.
HyperDev’s pricing structure includes a free tier that caps usage at a million tokens. A pay-as-you-go option allows users to access more AI compute while keeping control of their total spend. An auto-renew option is also available for heavy users with larger budgets.
‘Never been easier’
“Some people want that, are happy with it and they have the budget. For them, speed is often more important than saving money. But for most people, we advise they only add tokens as and when they need them,” said Moulder.
The web-based interface allows for both text and voice input, and memory is persistent — Moulder said this is important for building context so the model improves as iterative prompts are entered by the user.
Read: SA start-up uses AI to build websites for R69/month
To date, HyperDev has raised US$1-million in seed funding and is in the middle of another round, though Moulder is careful not to over-index on capital.
“We don’t want to drink the funding Kool-Aid too much,” he said. “It’s never been easier and more possible and cheaper for you to launch something.” — (c) 2026 NewsCentral Media
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