Software development startup RapidCanvas Inc. today announced that it has raised $29 million in funding.
Vertex Ventures SEA & India led the Series B round with contributions from Hitachi Ventures, Accel, Peak XV Partners, Valley Capital Partners and Titanium Ventures. The deal follows a $16 million investment in 2024.
RapidCanvas develops custom artificial intelligence applications for companies with between $100 million and $1 billion in annual revenue. Its engineers write software with the help of an automation toolkit called the RapidCanvas Enterprise AI Platform. According to the company, it automates about 60% of the work usually involved in building AI applications.
The toolkit’s first component, the Enterprise Context Engine, collects business data from clients’ internal systems. It uses that information to improve the AI applications delivered by RapidCanvas.
If an application receives a prompt that contains a company-specific term or business metric, the Enterprise Context Engine can clarify what it means. That makes the underlying AI models less likely to make mistakes.
The tool also maps out how a company’s employees perform business tasks. AI applications can use that knowledge to identify the best way of automating repetitive work. If the Enterprise Context Engine has incomplete or inconsistent information about how a task is performed, it asks a human for help.
The second component of RapidCanvas’ automation platform is a library of prepackaged application modules. They cover common tasks such as user authentication, document processing and vulnerability detection. The modules remove the need for RapidCanvas engineers to build client applications from scratch.
Once an application is ready, RapidCanvas verifies that it works as intended using a tool called Operational Harness. The tool evaluates each use case that the application automates against task-specific reliability criteria. For example, Operational Harness can check how well AI-generated document summaries align with the source material.
RapidCanvas’ engineers start client projects by identifying an AI use case that can deliver a quick return on investment. After the customer verifies that the company’s approach works, AI is applied to additional tasks. Tech-savvy clients can optionally use RapidCanvas’ internal automation tooling to build software on their own.
The company delivers its development tooling and professional services through a single subscription. It has so far built software for more than 75 clients in verticals such as the manufacturing, finance and retail sectors. RapidCanvas says that its annualized revenue has grown eightfold over the past 18 months.
“Vibe coding has made it easy to start building with AI. Getting AI into production reliably and safely still remains the biggest gap,” said RapidCanvas co-founder and Chief Executive Officer Rahul Pangam. “Our growth over the past six quarters is evidence that AI in enterprises is moving beyond pilots into production and real operations.”
RapidCanvas will use its newly raised funds to grow its go-to-market and AI engineering teams.