LightSprint raises $6.1M to help PMs, designers and ops ship on their real codebase

LightSprint has raised a $6.1M seed round to help everyone at a company build software. The round was led by 645 Ventures, with participation from January Capital, Y Combinator, Rebel Fund, Fjor, Sterling Road, Transpose Platform Management, Batch Ventures, Founders Capital and Seraph Group, and angel investors including Kaz Nejatian (Opendoor), Eli Brown, Henri Stern and many more. We're grateful to everyone backing us, using LightSprint, sending feedback and helping us make it better.

We're building a software factory that helps CTOs empower PMs, designers and ops to ship on their real codebase. Sales and marketing teams can direct agents too, while engineering stays in control of every merge. Here's why.

Everyone should build now

For most of software history, building belonged to a small group of people. Everyone else wrote tickets, drew mockups and waited.

That boundary is disappearing.

The people closest to customers already know what needs to change. The salesperson who hears the same request on every call. The designer who sees exactly where users get stuck. The marketer who needs a new page live this week. The ops lead who knows which internal tool slows the whole team down.

With coding agents, they no longer have to hand that knowledge to someone else and hope it survives the translation. They can direct agents to build it themselves.

The companies we speak to are adopting a "coding for all" strategy. They want PMs, designers, sales, marketing and ops building with agents alongside engineering, on the product customers actually use.

We believe every company will work this way.

Prototypes were act one

The first wave of AI building tools taught a generation that they could build. Describe an app, refine it in conversation, and watch it appear. People who had spent their careers adjacent to code made working software for the first time.

That was act one. It happened on a blank canvas.

Most product work doesn't. Real companies run on complex codebases, often spread across multiple repositories, with years of conventions, dependencies and review rules behind them. A prototype can ignore all of that. A production change can't.

So the prototype turns into a handoff. Engineers rebuild the feature from scratch, and reviewers inherit large batches of AI-written code with no shared plan or context behind it. Building got faster. The handoff didn't.

Act two is building on the real product, together. That's what LightSprint is for.

One shared place to build together

In LightSprint, the whole team works on the same change.

LightSprint connects to your existing codebase, including setups across multiple repositories, and learns your team's skills and conventions. Anyone can describe a change in plain language. The team agrees on a plan together before any code is written, while the work is still cheap to change. LightSprint then takes it to a live preview everyone can click through, and finished code.

It runs in the cloud, so nobody needs to install developer tools or set up the code on their own computer. Engineers set up the environment once, and every agent and colleague builds on it. Built-in safeguards, such as keeping credentials out of AI-written code, protect the codebase.

Feedback from code review agents comes together in one place, and engineers review and merge the work through the process they already use. Instead of translating mockups into code, they spend their time on the decisions that need their judgment.

The result is fewer handoffs and more people shipping. Since launching, LightSprint has helped non-engineers ship thousands of pull requests.

Who we are

We're builders who have spent our careers on both sides of the handoff, between the people who know what customers need and the people who turn it into code. We've lived the queue, the rebuilds and the lost context, and we started LightSprint so no team has to work that way again.

Ben scaled AI products at Sea Group (NYSE: SE). Benedict was CTO of BitGo (NYSE: BTGO) and VP of Engineering at Chainlink. Heng Hong was one of the early engineers on Facebook Messenger at Meta. Between us, we've written the specs, led the engineering teams and shipped the code ourselves.

In 2026, we started LightSprint together to reimagine the software development process. We went through Y Combinator's Spring 2026 batch, and TechCrunch named us one of 11 standout companies from the cohort.

Everyone ships

We want everyone at a company to direct agents and ship to the real product, with engineering in control of every merge.

The best PMs won't be measured by the tickets they write. The best designers won't stop at the handoff. Sales, marketing and ops won't wait in a queue for small changes. And the best engineers will shape the system everyone builds inside.

"We're seeing product managers, designers and even business teams build features and submit high-quality code changes themselves, while engineering stays in control," said Ben Ong, co-founder and CEO of LightSprint.

Lexi Quirk, Managing Director at 645 Ventures, described the gap we're working on:

The product lifecycle hasn't collapsed under AI; it has expanded and accelerated exponentially. To manage this, the industry is missing a unified surface where engineers, PMs, and designers can collaborate on the same change. Lightsprint is building that layer, and the volume of PRs pushed from product teams using the platform speaks for itself.

With this funding, we're expanding our enterprise-ready product and growing our engineering and go-to-market team. If you want to help build this, we're hiring.

If your team has a backlog of changes waiting on engineering, try LightSprint for free. Start with one change you've been waiting on.

Act two starts now.

Get in touch: founders@lightsprint.ai

The LightSprint team