AI startup Ivy scraps “Lovable for internal tools” and pivots to coding orchestration
Swedish AI startup Ivy Interactive has dropped its nearly completed product just weeks before launch. The company is now going all in on Ivy Tendril, an open-source software for orchestrating AI coding agents. The bold pivot reflects a market where what was cutting-edge yesterday is already old today.
“We basically killed everything,” says co-founder and CEO Niels Bosma. “Agent, billing, website, roadmap. All of it. The pace right now is insane. What was hot a few months ago already feels outdated. We realized we were building for a world that’s disappearing.”
From near-launch to full pivot
Just two weeks before launch, Ivy was preparing to release Ivy Studio, a Lovable-style builder for internal .NET tools. But internally, a bigger question emerged. Was the product being built for how software is developed today, or for how it will be developed tomorrow? The answer led to a rapid shift. Within days, the team scrapped Ivy Studio and refocused entirely on Tendril, a system originally built for internal use.
From coding tools to AI orchestration
Tendril coordinates 20–30 AI coding agents in parallel across planning, execution, testing, and review, turning development into a structured pipeline rather than a series of prompts. The core insight was that as models improve rapidly, the bottleneck is no longer the AI itself, but how it is organized.
“A mediocre agent with the right structure outperforms a brilliant agent without one,” says Bosma. “Think of it as CI/CD for AI coding.”
Internally, the impact was immediate. Output increased from around 10 to over 100 pull requests per day, while code quality improved. Early pilot users have seen similar results.
Built for a rapidly shifting market
AI development is moving so quickly that tools soon become outdated, and model ecosystems change continuously. Tendril is designed as an open-source, local-first, and model-agnostic system, allowing teams to adapt without rebuilding workflows or losing accumulated knowledge.
“For many companies, flexibility and control are critical,” says co-founder and CRO Renco Smeding. “You need to be able to switch models and still keep your system intact.”
The business case
Ivy positions Tendril as a way to significantly increase developer output without increasing cost. For a typical team, LLM costs remain a fraction of a single developer's salary, while productivity gains can reach multiple times baseline output.
“We tell companies: give us three days,” says Smeding. “If it doesn’t make a measurable difference, walk away.”
Backed by Luminar Ventures, Ivy is now focused on building traction ahead of its next funding round.
Jacob Key, Partner at Luminar Ventures, says:
"When Niels showed us the productivity data from the Tendril pilots, the pivot was a no-brainer. This is a tool that every company employing developers will need. Ivy's local-first, open-source approach is exactly the right wedge into a market where trust and data sovereignty matter."
The company’s bet is clear. The future of software development will not be defined by better individual AI models, but by systems that orchestrate them.
Tendril is now available, with the source code released publicly at ivy.app.
Contact
Niels Bosma
Founder and CEO
Ivy Interactive AB
niels@ivy.app
+46767742725
About Ivy Interactive
Ivy Interactive AB is a Stockholm-based startup building the operating system for AI development. Founded in 2025 and backed by Luminar Ventures, Ivy’s flagship product is Tendril. Tendril is an open-source, local-first code orchestration tool. It turns ad-hoc AI coding into a systematic, verifiable, self-improving discipline. Tendril is agent-agnostic; it works with Claude Code, Codex, Gemini, and self-hosted models. It has helped teams achieve 5–10x productivity gains. Think of it as CI/CD for the coding itself.
Read more on https://ivy.app and https://tendril.ivy.app.