Codecrafters wants to challenge seasoned developers with hard-to-build projects

There are plenty of online platforms for developers that help you learn new skills or get started with a new language, such as CodeCademy, Leetcode, and CodeSignal. Some guide developers step by step through the process while teaching the basics, while others provide detailed video tutorials.

Codecrafters is a platform that doesn’t want to show developer videos or hold their hands when they’re learning new languages. Instead, it wants to provide tough challenges for advanced developers to build a project, master a programming language, and learn other concepts along the way.

The Y Combinator-backed startup was built by Sarup Bankosta and Paul Kuruvilla in 2022. The pair met during IIT prep school in Chennai.

After completing university, Kuruvilla became a manager at the company where he worked and set himself the challenge of building a Redis clone from scratch — Redis is an open-source data structure store — to upskill and motivate team members. He eventually made a workshop out of this experience and put it on a website with instructions. Bankosta told TechCrunch this was essentially Codecrafters v0, but for Kuruvilla’s workshops.

After Bankosta quit his job at Vercel, the duo started to build Codecrafters. They thought people would come to the site to learn the internals of Git, Docker, or Redis. But instead, people came to master a programming language.

When the startup joined Y Combinator, it wasn’t making money, and the duo had to tune the product for a better product-market fit.

“During the very first days of YC, advisors asked us about monetization. We added a pricing page on our site. But our users didn’t like us as much when we started charging them. We had to build features to justify our monetization and make the journey of using the platform better during that time,” Bankosta said.

The company has raised a $1.8 million seed round from notable individuals, including Instagram co-founder Mike Krieger, Dropbox co-founder Arash Ferdowsi, ex-Vercel COO Kevin Van Gundy, Supabse CEO Paul Copplestone, BaseCase capital’s solo VC Anala Goyal, and PlanetScale co-founder Jitendra Vaidya.

Krieger, who is now chief product officer at Anthropic, told TechCrunch over email that he has always picked up new skills by building projects.

“I find building software end to end to be a much more satisfying experience than just learning syntax. What I love about Codecrafters is that all the learning is grounded in building real things — the challenges, like building Redis or SQLite from scratch — both deepen students’ understanding of the language they’re studying but also of core concepts like distributed systems performance, and API design,” he said.

The platform

The core premise of Codecrafters is “Build your own x” projects, such as a BitTorrent client, Git, Redis, Docker, Shell, a text editor, and more.

Once you create an account on Codecrafters, you get to choose from an array of these challenges. The platform has divided these challenges into different stages and assigned difficulty levels against those stages, along with the details of how the project would work.

You can select a programming language of your choice for that project and also choose your proficiency with that language. If you are a beginner, the platform points you to a resource where you can get started and come back to attempt the challenge when you are better versed in the language.

After the initial setup, Codecrafters builds a repository for you, which you can clone to your system. The initial repository has code that is meant to get you started with the project. You can use a choice of your development environment (IDE) to build the project and commit code to the repository.

Each stage comes with a page that explains the task, a discussion tab with comments and tips from other folks who attempted the challenge, some coding solutions for builders to compare the core logic, and concept explanations and resources. The company has also implemented an AI chatbot that explains code solutions to users in the context of the stage.

As for paid customers, the company offers a continuous integration (CI) layer so they can quickly test their code, get automated feedback, and keep working on the project.

Developers can access challenges for free, but they will only get access to the content of the first two stages (or all stages for the project of the month). They can pay to access unlimited content, practice in anonymous mode, take advantage of the CI features and get priority support. Currently, Codecrafters offers a three-month plan for $120, an annual plan of $360, and a $990 lifetime plan.

Opportunity and plan

Currently, most of the people working with Codecrafters are contractors. The team is constantly creating new additions and extensions to current challenges and thinking about new challenges for coders.

In addition to the bot that explains code, the company is also working on a feature to provide AI-powered hints to users. Bankosta said that their advantage over other generalized chatbots is that the company trains models in the context of solutions for different challenges.

“Any chatbot will be able to tell you solutions for a code block or a problem. However, we have code submissions from different developers for the same problem. So we have an advantage of creating better contextual hints,” he said.

Codecrafters investor and former Vercel COO Kevin Van Gundy said that there are a lot of tools for beginners, but there aren’t many companies building solutions for experienced devs to pick up new skills or capabilities.

“There are plenty of videos on YouTube, resources from likes Khan Academy and MIT for people to learn. However, the interaction layer for developers is essential. It’s important for platforms like Codecrafters to build incremental steps for developers to keep them engaged,” he said.

“The platform enables developers to go through the process of building whole applications. Engineers who have gone through an entire problem set like that tend to be better builders.”

Companies like OpenAI and Anthropic are building tools that generate code and help engineers automate some of their processes. Amid this, Krieger believes that high-level software design will be a sought-after skill.

“As LLMs continue to improve in their ability to both generate code and also help with agentic coding tasks that are more end-to-end, the skills that will be valued by employers (and useful to entrepreneurs) are the higher-level software design that Codecrafters teaches through its courses,” he said.