Croatian entrepreneur Vedran Cindric is a skilled software developer with an impressive 18 years of experience in PHP and MYSQL programming, and also a strong supporter of his country’s local technology ecosystem.
Wanting to solve the challenges developers themselves face when developing APIs, in 2020 Cindric founded Treblle, an observability and analytics platform that helps engineering and DevOps consolidate and scale their APIs and APIOps. In the following years, the company expanded its product portfolio and managed to raise $7 million by the end of 2022.
In an interview with The Recursive, Cindric talks about what it means to create meaningful AI products today, the engineering talent available in Croatia and the rest of CEE, and the strengths and weaknesses of an AI ecosystem. AI in development in the country. region.
The following interview was conducted as part of The Recursive’s “State of AI in CEE” report. Download the full report with insights from over 40 experts and analysis of 900 CEE AI product companies here.
The Recursive: What are the main reasons behind the creation of Treblle and what challenges is the company currently facing?
Vedran Cindric: I used to run a software development company here in Zagreb and we did a lot of app development, web development for companies run by brands like Porsche, Hugo Boss, Cisco, etc. I ran this for 10 years, and in the last five years most projects started or ended with an API.
I’m about to be a developer myself, and every time I developed an API it took me a week, I spent three weeks providing support and helping other people use the API. So that’s where the original idea came from. I was getting so many questions about this. How can I integrate? How can I fix this? It doesn’t work for me. So I said: Hey, can we create a tool that could help them see what they’re doing and stop asking me questions? So I say the first reason was probably quite selfish, I didn’t want to be bothered.
Essentially, that was the basic idea, and that’s how we started. I would basically say I wanted to democratize access to the actual API and the actual API data. And then it all got out of hand, and we spun it off into a separate company and we’ve been building it ever since.
You recently launched Alfred, the AI-powered API assistant. What is the technology behind this?
Everyone has been involved in this AI frenzy, and I think every startup that has come along in the last few years has probably gotten a call from investors about what they’re doing in AI. Even though we like to follow trends, I didn’t want to push something that wouldn’t make sense. And the more we thought about how we incorporate AI and how we can use it to create a meaningful product – that’s when we kind of got this idea from Alfred, which is kind of based on Alfred from Batman.
Essentially, Alfred includes the underlying API documentation, which we generate completely automatically for you. The journey of our AI tool therefore begins even before this, because we generate the documentation for you. We give the AI the AI model or the big language model your API documentation. It has an understanding of it and allows you to ask any question about the documentation of this API.
How has the Treblle product line evolved since its launch and what trends are you following?
It started out as a single product, and that product was API interoperability. So my initial idea was to give everyone the same set of tools that I have to understand the API. And then we started adding things like auto-generated documentation, because people said that would be cool. So one of the two trends that we’ve started to follow, and a major trend that I think will drive massive investments in the future, is security. We also launched a security product earlier this year, specifically aimed at APIs.
There is an emerging AI innovation ecosystem in Croatia. What are the strengths and weaknesses that you have witnessed during the development of this ecosystem?
In recent years, many startups, including Treblle, have been able to obtain funding, which is great news, but there are also many startups that unfortunately do not see the light at the end of the tunnel. But essentially, like any ecosystem, there are really good companies and bad companies.
The good thing is that investors are starting to realize, especially most of the investors I’ve spoken to, that there is raw engineering talent in this region, especially in Croatia, that are underutilized, underserved and they are brought in to come invest and unlock that potential with a lot of money makes a lot of sense, especially with companies like Fonoa raising 60 million, Cognism, ReversingLabs, all these guys who , basically, are really good at what they do and now have investors who recognize that and have more confidence in the region.
How would you rate the level of collaboration between AI companies and 1) universities and research institutes, and 2) government?
I don’t think collaboration between AI or non-AI startups in companies in Croatia with the Croatian government takes place. To be completely honest, some may be doing small projects. But generally speaking, everything here is basically done by three large conglomerates. One of them, I think, is 50% owned by the Croatian government and the other two are like two big IP providers that do absolutely everything. So if you just want to get started, you have to work with one of these companies, so I don’t think that’s a very good and positive thing.
I think there is potential that could be unlocked. I know that our Croatian Language Research Institute has a lot of data that could possibly help educate large language models, for example by making grammatical checks during creation and generating more accurate content in Croatian. I think part of the problem is that the head of the Croatian research institute doesn’t understand that he is sitting on a goose that lays golden eggs and he doesn’t know how to move that needle.
How has funding and investor support affected Treblle’s overall development and what’s next for the company?
I think we were very lucky to find investors very early on who supported us from day one, and then the new American investors who invested 7 million in our last round. We have a lot of freedom there and they allow us to run the product and run everything hands-free.
I think there’s a lot of trust that needs to come from both sides and it’s something we’re working on, it’s not a given. AlsoSince I started in 2020, there has been a huge increase in investors in Croatia.
