“Software engineering is dead. It might be a year, it might be two, but 99.9% of people will not be writing code.”

MIT CSAIL Professor Tim Kraska had just spent three years running a large engineering team inside AWS, where he witnessed firsthand the shift toward agentic code generation.

Despite the explosion in the amount of code being written, Tim believed the industry was still placing too much emphasis on the code itself. What was needed was a new abstraction layer for software development—a fifth generation. Hence, “G5.”

Tim envisioned a world in which organizations articulate their intent, and underneath, a living software system is continuously built, updated, secured, and managed as that intent evolves.

In this world, generating code is no longer the hard part. The challenge becomes defining precisely what the software is supposed to do: translating ambiguous human intent into executable specifications, keeping those specifications synchronized with an evolving production system, governing what can change and how, and proving that the resulting software remains secure, compliant, observable, and correct.

Tim focused his MIT research lab on this problem and, after making major breakthroughs in just a handful of months, decided to spin the work out into a company. He is joined by a founding engineering team that includes multiple MIT computer science PhDs and senior systems talent from AWS, Google, and Amazon—all working to rethink what becomes possible when software is managed at the level of intent rather than code.

Today, the G5 platform is live in production with a number of large Fortune 1000 companies, where early reception has been exceptionally strong.

We believe the future of software will be driven by human intent, and G5 is building the platform that makes that future possible.

We’re thrilled to partner with Tim and the G5 team, alongside our friends at Battery Ventures, in co-leading the company’s seed round.