Mintlify
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Last reviewed
Jun 4, 2026
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Review status
Source-backed
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v1 · 1,793 words
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Mintlify is a documentation platform for software companies, based in San Francisco and founded in 2021 by Han Wang and Hahnbee Lee. It lets engineering teams write docs as code (Markdown and MDX kept in Git) and publishes them as fast, customizable hosted sites. Mintlify went through Y Combinator's Winter 2022 batch and has since repositioned around what it calls "the intelligence age," adding AI features such as an assistant trained on a company's docs, a writing agent, and machine-readable outputs (llms.txt, Markdown exports, and generated Model Context Protocol servers) so that large language model-based coding tools can read the documentation directly. By 2025 the company described itself as "The Intelligent Knowledge Platform" and powered docs for more than 5,000 companies, including Anthropic, Cursor, Perplexity, Zapier, Replit, and Coinbase.
Han Wang and Hahnbee Lee met at Cornell University through the Cornell Design and Tech Initiative, where they built a course-planning app used by a large share of the school's undergraduates. Lee studied computer science and briefly worked as an engineer at Duolingo; Wang studied information science and had earlier co-founded Foodful (cloud-based monitoring for cattle) and a customer-community startup called People, which was acquired in early 2021. Wang also spent time as an investor before going full time on the company.
The pair founded Mintlify in 2021. The original product was not a documentation platform at all. Their first idea, Figstack, was a tool that took a block of code and explained in English what it did, pitched as a kind of "Google Translate for code"; it reached number one Product of the Day on Product Hunt. After being accepted into Y Combinator's Winter 2022 batch, the founders cycled through several products, including Doc Writer, an IDE extension that generated docstrings from source code. Over roughly five months they launched four products before, in September 2022, settling on building the documentation platform itself. The company has cited a lesson from that period: "Your real runway is the number of pivots left in you."
Early on, the product leaned heavily on automatically generating documentation from a codebase using natural language processing and web scraping, and it could flag stale docs and track reader engagement. It integrated with tools such as GitHub, Slack, and Dropbox. The company was initially based in Ithaca, New York, before moving its center of gravity to San Francisco.
Mintlify raised a $2.8 million seed round announced on May 31, 2022, led by Bain Capital Ventures, with participation from TwentyTwo Ventures and Quinn Slack, co-founder of Sourcegraph. At the time the company had a three-person core team and said it would use the money for product development and hiring.
On September 3, 2024, Mintlify announced an $18 million Series A led by Andreessen Horowitz, with existing investors including Bain Capital Ventures and Y Combinator participating. The round brought total funding to about $21 million. (TechCrunch reported the round as $18.5 million and the total as $21.7 million; the company's own announcement used the rounded $18 million and $21 million figures.) No valuation was disclosed.
| Round | Date | Amount | Lead investor | Notable participants |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Seed | May 2022 | $2.8M | Bain Capital Ventures | TwentyTwo Ventures; Quinn Slack (Sourcegraph) |
| Series A | September 2024 | ~$18M | Andreessen Horowitz | Bain Capital Ventures; Y Combinator |
According to research firm Sacra, Mintlify grew from roughly $1 million in annual recurring revenue in 2024 to about $10 million in 2025, a roughly tenfold increase, with reported net revenue retention around 150 percent. These revenue figures come from third-party estimates rather than company disclosures and should be treated as approximate.
Mintlify is built around a docs-as-code workflow. Writers author content in Markdown and MDX, store it in a Git repository, and Mintlify publishes a hosted documentation site with custom domains, search, navigation, and theming. Because the source is Markdown in version control, documentation changes flow through the same pull-request and review process as software, which the company and its customers cite as a reason updates ship quickly.
Core capabilities include:
A defining part of Mintlify's positioning is making documentation readable by AI systems and AI agents, not just humans. The company has framed documentation as an "AI interface" that coding assistants consume on a user's behalf.
Mintlify automatically hosts an llms.txt file at the root of a docs site. The llms.txt standard, proposed in September 2024 by Jeremy Howard of Answer.AI, is a plain-text index that helps language models find and parse a site's content, analogous to how a sitemap helps search engines. Mintlify's generated file lists every page with .md links and descriptions drawn from each page's frontmatter, and it also produces an llms-full.txt file that concatenates the entire documentation set into one Markdown file suitable for pasting into an AI tool's context. When a request arrives with an Accept: text/markdown header, Mintlify can serve clean Markdown instead of HTML so that agents receive only the text they need (content negotiation).
Mintlify also generates Model Context Protocol (MCP) servers directly from a customer's docs and OpenAPI spec. MCP, an open standard released by Anthropic in November 2024, lets applications expose data and tools to language models in a consistent way. A docs-generated MCP server lets an AI coding assistant search a product's documentation in real time during a task, and, where an API spec is present, even make authenticated API calls, so answers reflect the current docs rather than a model's stale training data.
The scale of agent traffic has become a talking point for the company. In a March 2026 report analyzing 30 days of traffic across Mintlify-hosted sites (using Cloudflare user-agent data), the company said AI coding agents accounted for about 45 percent of requests to documentation, nearly matching human browser traffic. It reported that Anthropic's Claude Code and Cursor together made up roughly 95.6 percent of identified AI-agent traffic, with Claude Code alone generating about 199 million requests in the period. The company noted that some agents, such as OpenAI's Codex, do not send identifiable user-agent headers, so the true share of AI traffic is likely higher.
Mintlify's publicly listed pricing has evolved. As of mid-2026 the site advertises a free Starter plan and a custom-priced Enterprise plan, with AI usage metered by credits.
| Plan | Price | Intended for | Highlights |
|---|---|---|---|
| Starter | Free (14-day trial of paid features, no card required) | Individuals and small teams | Full platform, custom domain, web editor, AI assistant, writing agent, workflows, MCP server; 5,000 AI credits included, overages billed (about $0.01 each) |
| Enterprise | Custom (contact sales) | Scaling and global teams | Everything in Starter plus role-based permissions, SSO, performance SLA, agent analytics, enterprise security and legal review, migration and support |
Earlier in the company's history the lineup included a paid Pro tier (reported around $250 per month for a handful of editor seats) between the free and enterprise options, reflecting a shift over time toward AI-usage-based pricing.
Mintlify is widely used among software and AI companies. The Bain Capital Ventures profile (January 2025) said the platform powered documentation for more than 5,000 companies with over 2 million unique monthly visitors. Named customers include Anthropic, Cursor, Perplexity, Replit, Zapier, Coinbase, HubSpot, Pinecone, Together AI, Cognition, Lovable, Laravel, Anaconda, Fidelity, PayPal, and X.
Anthropic is a frequently cited case study. The company adopted Mintlify around the 2024 launch of Claude 3.5 Sonnet, when it needed documentation that could scale with a fast-moving product, and Mintlify says more than 1.5 million developers reach Anthropic's docs each month. Anthropic and Mintlify co-developed the llms.txt and llms-full.txt outputs to improve how the docs are ingested by AI tools, and Anthropic uses Mintlify's MCP and Markdown-export features so its documentation plugs directly into developer tooling. Other public case studies report concrete operational wins: Coinbase cutting the time to update a doc from about 20 minutes to under a minute, HubSpot reducing the engineering effort spent on docs, and Laravel migrating more than ten products in roughly three days.
The company has also pointed to traction among early-stage startups, saying at the time of its Series A that more than 20 percent of the most recent Y Combinator batch relied on Mintlify and that content on the platform reached more than 20 million developers a year.