CodeFundi: How this Kenyan software engineer created an AI assistant for coders

By the time he was completing his undergraduate studies at Strathmore University in 2019, Felix Waweru knew he had a passion for software development.

It was around this time that a conversation around generative artificial intelligence (AI) was building, and the informatics major was researching the subject.

By 2021, the now hugely popular American artificial intelligence company OpenAI had released GPT-3, its third large language model that could generate human-like text and which has been credited with stimulating the AI boom.

Chatbot applications began growing, thanks to these large language models, alongside tools that could generate almost real-looking images and speech synthesisers that could speak like humans.

Against this backdrop, Waweru began toying around with the idea of building his own AI models. The software engineer finished school and started working in technology across finance, healthcare and construction.

“Having worked as an engineer and from my interaction with software developers, I discovered that most developers spend over 75 per cent of their time fixing errors,” Waweru told Citizen Digital.

He came up with CodeFundi, a tool which developers could use to integrate into their code-writing software.

Waweru started by building his model from scratch after interacting with ChatGPT, the blockbuster chatbot and virtual assistant released by OpenAI in November 2022.

“However, one of the biggest challenges was that building a model was very expensive. It also needed a lot of time training it,” he says.

He therefore opted to build his tool on the integration of different language models such as OpenAI’s GPT and Claude by the U.S. AI start-up Anthropic.

“We did some additional training and tweaking of the models to customize it for software developers,” adds Waweru.

CodeFundi launched in September 2023. It is an AI assistant that helps developers write better code faster by fixing and generating code, right in their editor.

The platform interacts directly with a developer’s code, offering features such as code generation, debugging and explanations, regardless of the programming language used.

“With CodeFundi, we made it different from the typical tools where one needs to run prompts in a browser. It directly interacts with your code and automatically generates solutions to your code or new codes for you,” Waweru says.

Alongside OpenAI, big American ‘Big Tech’ companies such as Google parent Alphabet, Amazon, Apple, Microsoft and Facebook parent Meta dominate the commercial AI scene globally.

Most of these tech giants own the vast majority of existing cloud computing infrastructure, and new players often rely on their support to host their systems. CodeFundi, for instance, uses Google and Microsoft for cloud support.

One might think of it as similar to tools like Copilot, but Waweru says the code completion tool by GitHub and OpenAI is focused on the chat experience, unlike CodeFundi.

On data security and privacy, he says they do not use customer data for training.

“Any information a coder or a business passes to CodeFundi is stored in our servers but we don’t use or access it,” says Waweru, adding that the early-stage start-up is GDPR-compliant.

General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) regulations were created by the European Union (EU) and effected in 2018 to control how organizations collect, handle, and protect the personal data of EU residents.

CodeFundi has so far gotten over 1,000 installs in 30 countries.

“Our AI assistant can understand any language from English and Swahili to Japanese. We believe this has contributed to us getting users from several parts of the world,” says Waweru.

The start-up is bootstrapped, which means Waweru has funded the project so far, although he says they are engaging investors to get backing.

“Being a software-as-a-service (SaaS) provider, we have luckily not needed to buy things like inventory, stock or invest in logistics, but we are in discussion with local and international angel investors and venture capitalists and are in the due diligence process,” he says.