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Dassie

The way software gets built inside companies is changing fast.

We think the tools aren't changing fast enough.

More people than ever can describe what they want in plain language and get something working. The problem is what comes next. They can't ship it safely, they can't maintain it, and they can't bring it into a real codebase without help. So the idea dies, or they file a ticket and wait.

Dassie is a platform that lets non-technical builders work directly inside their company's existing codebase. They connect their repo, and Dassie gives them a safe environment to make changes: write specs, build features, fix bugs, and understand what's already there. It continuously monitors their changes for security gaps, missing functionality, and anything that would block a real launch or create regressions in the code. Every change goes through an approval layer before it touches production, so engineering teams stay in control without becoming a bottleneck — and spend significantly more time building meaningful features, not babysitting bug fixes.

The tools that exist for working in real codebases — Cursor, Copilot, Claude Code — are built for engineers. They assume you can read a diff, understand a dependency, parse a PR, and know what you're touching. Dassie is built for everyone else on the team: the PM who knows exactly what the button should do but can't implement it, the support lead who keeps filing the same UI fix, the growth team that needs a report that doesn't exist yet. They get a plain-language interface into the actual codebase, without needing to file a ticket.

There's also a layer of people who aren't trying to build anything, they just need to know what's going on. Non-technical cofounders and product leaders who currently get their codebase context secondhand through standups, Slack threads, or PRs they can't fully read. Dassie gives them a direct line: what changed, why, what's broken, what's shipping. In plain language, connected to the actual code, project management tools, and communication channels, without anyone having to write a summary.

We're targeting internal teams first — people with a budget, a clear ROI story, and a daily need. The longer-term vision is the same product serving small business owners and independent builders as that market matures.

Founding team

Craig WattrusLinkedIn ↗

Craig is a product designer and engineer who has spent his career at the intersection of complex infrastructure and the people who use it. He was the first local hire at ThoughtWorks Africa, one of the first seven employees at Yoco, and joined Braintree three years into the PayPal acquisition, where he led developer experience and helped build the drop-in payments tools used across Braintree, PayPal, and Venmo. He went on to join the founding design team at Tegus, built the product design teams at Foxtrot and Crafty, and most recently led applied research at an AI startup where he built the agent architecture that became the company's core product. He's also founded two previous companies. He builds Dassie from firsthand experience watching non-technical operators get locked out of the software they depend on.

Rohan JansenLinkedIn ↗

Rohan is a product leader and mobile engineer who has spent over a decade building software across fintech, IoT, and enterprise platforms. He was an early mobile engineer at Yoco, where he built the point-of-sale and payments SDK from the ground up with Craig. He went on to lead mobile engineering at Prodigy Finance, and is a founding team member and Head of Product at FloatPays. He also co-founded Plao Digital, a consultancy specializing in enterprise software. He brings to Dassie deep experience building for regulated, high-stakes environments and a firsthand understanding of what it takes to ship real products with small teams.

A dassie sunning itself on a rock surrounded by succulents