Raising Venture Capital in High School

“We want to give you an offer.”
The dilemma.

As a high school student, I faced a difficult decision: do I go to college, or do I start a company?

One of the critical moments in my decision-making process came after I had just raised our pre-seed round for my startup, Kodezi. At that point, I had multiple college acceptance letters, and I had to decide whether to pursue a life in a dorm room or focus on building my company.

Now, I’m often asked why I chose to start a company so early. The truth is, the goal isn’t to be a CEO or have the title. The goal is to solve a real problem — and build a solution that can scale to millions of people. It’s not about ego. It’s about impact.

I’ve noticed that my friends and others look at me differently now that I’m building a startup. Some see it as something unique and challenging. Others still don’t quite understand what I’m doing — why I’m on a plane instead of in a dorm room. Ironically, some of the same colleges I was accepted to are now inviting me to speak about starting a company.

What I’ve learned is that building a startup is not easy. It requires hard work, dedication, and persistence. But it’s also incredibly rewarding. I’m solving problems that matter. I’m learning something new every day. And I’m growing — as a builder, and as a person.

I’m grateful for the opportunity to build Kodezi, and I’m excited to see where it goes.

The Funding

I'm both thankful and excited that Water Tower Ventures and RTP Global have invested in our pre-seed round. I’m looking forward to what the next 12 months will bring.

Jeremy, Idan, and the entire Water Tower team have been incredibly professional and great to work with — along with Tom and Alex from RTP Global. Thank you for believing in Kodezi. I know we’ll accomplish amazing things together.

A special thanks goes out to Eric, who was the first to invest in my vision and has guided me through every aspect of the startup journey. Thank you for your unwavering support. I know answering questions at 3am on Slack isn’t fun.

Over the past year, I’ve worked relentlessly on Kodezi — a Grammarly for programmers. After finishing our closed beta last year, I realized this could have a much more significant impact than I initially thought.

I received thousands of sign-ups during the closed beta. I spoke with engineers, students from my high school, and students from top universities like MIT, Stanford, and Harvard. Every person shared a common pain point: they wanted to spend less time debugging and more time building.

Can you believe it takes 30x longer to fix a bug than to write the code?
It’s a problem that developers at all levels deal with every day.
And the existing tools weren’t solving it.

During this time, I never imagined I’d also be spending countless hours talking to angel investors, venture capitalists, and CEOs of major tech companies.

"We love your idea, but you're too young."
"Will people want to use this?"
"I think you're better off working for a company than starting your own."

Despite the validation I was getting from users, these were the most common responses I received in meetings. I won’t pretend the rejections didn’t affect me. But they didn’t stop me either.

Because I knew Kodezi could make a real difference in how people learn and write code.

The Present

Today, we’ve scaled Kodezi to 9 employees and reached over 200,000 beta users in less than six months. We’ve released major features like auto-debugging with detailed explanations, natural language to code generation, and automatic documentation — and we’re just getting started.

We’re actively expanding the platform, growing the user base, and building new features. We’re also looking for partnerships that help us reach more developers. We’re excited about the future of Kodezi and committed to providing the best coding experience possible.

So yes, I’m a 19-year-old student. I’m unproven, untested, and I can’t legally drink at networking events.

However, I’ve learned more in the past 12 months by doing than I ever expected.
It’s felt like my own version of an MBA — fast, unstructured, real.

This experience has been fun, exciting, stressful, and sometimes scary. I know I still have a long way to go. But with this new round of funding, a talented team, and a strong support system behind me, I’m excited and optimistic about Kodezi’s future.