Tempo

Tempo (also referred to as Tempo Labs) develops a visual editor for React applications that combines the interface conventions of a design tool with the underlying behavior of an IDE. The product is aimed at letting product managers, designers, and engineers work on the same production code, with AI assistance layered on top of both prompting and fine-grained manual editing. It is optimized for Vite and Tailwind, and supports React Native mobile development through Expo.

The company positions its product against two categories it describes as inadequate: "low-code"/design-to-code tools, which it says accelerate simple apps but fail to produce production-grade software for serious software companies, and newer AI web app builders, which it credits with a superior code-first approach but says still struggle with complex apps and large codebases. Tempo's stated approach is to merge an IDE (comparable to VS Code), a design tool (comparable to Figma), and an AI chat assistant into a single source of truth shared by designers and developers.

In its V2 release, Tempo added a fine-grain design panel for pixel-level control, a Figma plugin that converts designs into code inside Tempo, enhanced AI reasoning together with Gemini Search for debugging and development, pre-built SaaS templates for Stripe, Polar, Supabase, and Convex + Clerk, and Expo support. The company also offers an "Agent+" service under which it designs and ships one to three features per week for customers seeking additional roadmap capacity, with a discount offered to Y Combinator companies.

Founding story

Both founders previously worked at Perpetua, an AI advertising startup that exited for $150 million; Forbes reports that at Perpetua they observed substantial time being wasted translating design into code, which motivated Tempo. Kevin Michael spent five years as founding engineer and head of product at Perpetua and was previously a product fellow at Social Capital and an engineer on the Visual Studio team at Microsoft. Peter Gokhshteyn joined Perpetua as employee #3 and led engineering from idea to product-market fit, after software development roles at Google, Bloomberg, and Zynga.

Business model

Tempo sells a software development tool used by product teams to build and modify React applications. Alongside the core product, it offers Agent+, a service in which Tempo designs and ships one to three features per week for a customer's roadmap; a $500 discount for the first three months is offered to Y Combinator companies. The sources do not specify pricing tiers or contract structures.

The available sources do not state Tempo's pricing or how it charges for the product; the only commercial detail disclosed is the Agent+ service offering and a $500 first-three-months discount for YC companies.

Traction

Publicly disclosed traction is limited. Y Combinator lists a team size of 8 and an active status, with three open Toronto-based roles (full-stack software engineer, LLM/AI agents engineer, and founding product designer) offering CAD 125K-200K salaries and 0.25%-1.00% equity. Forbes reported over $1.2 million raised as of January 2024, and YC references a $5 million seed announced in October 2025. No customer counts, usage, or revenue figures are disclosed in the sources.

Latest developments

The most recent developments in the sources are the Tempo V2 release, which added the Figma plugin, fine-grain design panel, Gemini Search-backed AI reasoning, SaaS templates, and Expo/React Native support, and a $5 million seed round announced on October 22, 2025 and framed by Y Combinator as supporting the "design engineering movement."