India, July 17 -- "Startups are brutally hard," AI startup CodeParrot's cofounder and CTO Vedant Agarwala said in a post on LinkedIn while announcing the decision to shut the startup. The Y-Combinator backed startup, which was cofounded by Agarwala with Royal Jain (CEO) in 2022, failed to sustain business due to excessive burn as well as a lack of further investment interest from VCs.

"We didn't raise on Demo Day. We spent the next year stuck in pivot hell, searching for what our company really wanted to be. We hired and, painfully, had to let go of both the engineers. We burned through the $500k we'd raised - and when we hit $1,500 MRR with our final pivot (Figma-to-code using LLMs), we couldn't break through," the CTO said.

Initially,...