After months of struggle, piling up credit card debt and burning through their personal savings, entrepreneurs Levan Kvirkvelia and Daniel Dhawan were on the verge of bankruptcy. Dhawan was sleeping on a mattress on a friend’s floor in San Francisco, while Kvirkvelia stayed behind in Georgia, tirelessly building their new startup’s innovative product. Their previous apps had generated some financial cushion, but Rork, their latest project, was rapidly devouring every available resource they had.
But then, everything changed overnight—one tweet turned their fortunes completely around.
The tweet, posted in late February by Matt Shumer, co-founder and CEO of OthersideAI, praised Rork as exceptionally superior to a well-known competing product, Bolt. “My jaw just DROPPED,” Shumer emphatically posted, highlighting how Rork “lets you create entire iOS apps just by describing them,” without writing a single line of code. Accompanied by a compelling demonstration video, Shumer’s Twitter endorsement exploded online, quickly accumulating over one million views.
Within minutes, user sign-ups surged, but the sudden rise in activity strained the founders’ personal budgets further. They had already maxed out $15,000 each in personal credit, paying the steep AI operational costs out of their own pockets. Just as despair seemed inevitable, an angel investor stepped in—Austen Allred, Founder of BloomTech, invested $100,000 exactly fifteen minutes after the viral tweet appeared.
That pivotal day was just the start—by evening, noted investors including Elizabeth Yin from Hustle Fund and the team at Founders Inc. also jumped aboard. Within hours, commitments totaling around $350,000 had arrived, setting off a flood of introductions and calls from interested investors.
These new angel backers connected the founders to Andrew Chen, the general partner at Andreessen Horowitz leading their newly-launched Speedrun program—a prestigious 12-week accelerator designed to rapidly support high-potential startups. With a competing term sheet already in hand from another fund, Dhawan initially hesitated, but Chen immediately rallied his firm, quickly putting together an attractive counteroffer. Ultimately, the founders chose Speedrun, securing a $2.8 million seed investment led by Andreessen Horowitz. Additional backers included Hustle Fund, ChapterOne, Expo’s Charlie Cheever and Evan Bacon, Siqi Chen from Runway, and others.
The story behind this dramatic turnaround sounds cinematic, but the founders’ roller coaster journey was far from fiction. Prior to the launch of Rork, the duo had pivoted their approach several times, racing to market against formidable rivals like Lovable. Initially focused on web-based “vibe coders”—tools allowing non-technical users to easily build digital products—they decided to carve out a unique path by specializing entirely in building native mobile apps.
With Rork, users can effortlessly transform a simple text prompt into fully functional, code-free mobile apps—a notoriously challenging domain previously considered nearly impossible to simplify effectively. Their platform leverages popular mobile app frameworks such as Expo and React Native, becoming the first of its kind to truly democratize complex native mobile app development for users lacking technical expertise.
Just two months after their viral breakout launch, Rork reached an impressive $550,000 in annual recurring revenue. Today, the founders are no longer broke nor sleeping on borrowed mattresses—instead, their startup has transitioned onto a remarkable trajectory for success. With a16z’s Speedrun program scheduled this July, Kvirkvelia and Dhawan finally have the backing, resources, and mentorship to scale their revolutionary concept into a lasting business.
