Driftwave, a two-year-old startup whose founders have never seen their own codebase, closed a $200 million Series B this week at a $3 billion valuation, money the company says will be used “to hire the kind of people who can tell us what the app is.”
Founded in 2024 by Kayce Trembly, 24, and a former roommate whose equity is still being negotiated, Driftwave built its product entirely through vibe-coding: describing features to an AI agent in a group chat and accepting whatever shipped. “We told the agent we wanted something people would open every day, something sticky, something with a vibe of trust and abundance,” Trembly said. “The implementation details, like what it does, we left to the model. That’s called delegation, and it’s a core value here.”
This much is known: the app is called Drift, its icon is a soft blue gradient, 4.1 million people open it daily, it involves photographs at some stage, and revenue arrives every month, from somewhere, reliably. There is also a button in the corner that no one can remove. “We’ve asked the agent to remove the button,” Trembly said. “It adds a second button. We’ve stopped asking. Users love the buttons.”
Investors are unbothered. “We asked to review the codebase, and they showed us a conversation. Honestly, the best conversation I’ve read in years,” said Derrick Shao, a partner at Cravitz Capital, which led the round. “Whatever Drift does, it does it at 98 percent margins. In this market, you don’t interrupt that with questions.”
The company employs no engineers but retains 14 “prompt artisans,” all classified as independent contractors, as is, since the Series B closed, the co-founder. Some users have begun receiving what appear to be monthly statements, raising the possibility that Drift is a bank. “If it turns out we’re a bank, we will comply with all applicable banking regulations the moment we confirm that we are one,” said the company’s general counsel, who is a subscription.
At press time, Drift had shipped a major update overnight, described in the release notes only as “improvements,” and the company said it looked forward to finding out what they were.