Wasp’s platform is the glue that holds web dev apps together

When Matija Šošić started working in web development, he was surprised by how hard it was to build a full-stack production-ready web application.

One of the biggest hurdles Šošić faced was navigating the fragmented dev tooling landscape. Coding a web application required utilizing different tools for developing the front-end versus the back-end, and so on.

“The whole ecosystem is very modular and granulated,” Šošić told TechCrunch. “There’s a lot of these separate sub-systems, which you have to figure out how to paste together, and then also make sure they are both, you know, scalable and secure with everything you set up.”

In 2020, Šošić decided to pair up with his twin brother, Martin Šošić — who’d faced similar issues in his own developer career — to launch Wasp, a platform meant to connect these fragmented tools, in 2021.

Wasp is a full-stack web app dev tool that acts as the glue between the different platforms developers are already using, including React, Node.js, and Prisma, among others. Wasp helps compile the code from these different platforms together into one web application.

Wasp also spots and flags the gaps that are common when a developer mashes together different coding sources. Wasp will let a developer know if they are missing an API key, for example, or suggest potential code changes to prevent future issues.

That last piece is particularly important in today’s market as numerous new AI coding tools, like Windsurf (formerly Codeium) and Cursor, have made coding accessible to nontechnical folks. While that’s largely a good thing, Šošić said, “vibe coding doesn’t work for enterprise,” and Wasp can help budding developers build more secure, full-stack web applications.

Wasp’s platform is open source and can deploy to a public cloud or an enterprise server.

Šošić said that the founding team decided to build Wasp as a layer on top of existing tools as opposed to a completely new, out-of-the-box solution to eliminate developers having to learn a new programming language or process to use Wasp.

Wasp went through Y Combinator’s winter 2021 cohort and launched its product into beta in 2023. Since then, the company has racked up 26,000 GitHub stars, and it now works with numerous startups and Fortune 500 customers.

The company raised a previously-unannounced $3.7 million round led by HV Capital with participation from Fifth Quarter Ventures, Big Bets, and Metis Ventures, among other VCs, in late 2024. The round also included Ant Wilson, a co-founder and CTO of Supabase, and Søren Bramer Schmidt, the CEO of Prisma.

Wasp last raised funding in 2021 — a $1.5 million seed round. To date, the company has raised a total of $5.2 million.

“This gives us a very solid amount of, basically, freedom to work with,” Šošić said. “We are very excited to execute on the next level of the product, bring it to [version] 1.0, and further solidify the whole positioning in the AI spectrum.”

Šošić said the company is now focused on bringing the product to version 1.0, which will include features like support for different languages and server-side rendering.

“For us, you know, it is still focusing on the core product itself, which is the open source Wasp as well framework,” Šošić said. “With all the feedback that we have gotten from the last four years of building, I think now it’s become clear to us what we have to build and what we have to support to reach [version] 1.0.”