How Octave-X is Building Compliant AI Software Without Venture Capital
Turning an idea into working software has never been easier. Turning that same software into something enterprises can actually use is a very different challenge.
For many founders building with AI, speed is the headline feature. But behind the scenes, questions around security, reliability, and compliance still slow teams down, especially in regulated industries. In this interview, we spoke with Tarun Mittal, co-founder of Octave-X, about building an AI-first company in that reality and what it takes to ship quickly without cutting corners that matter later.
Overview
Business Name: Octave-X
Website URL: https://octave-x.com
Founders: Tarun Mittal and Desmend Jetton
Business Location: Chicago, Illinois
Year Started: 2024
Number of Employees/Contractors/Freelancers: 4
Tell us about yourself and your business.
My name is Tarun Mittal and I am the founder and CEO of Octave-X. I am a software engineer by profession, and I have a deep knowledge of machine learning as well. In the last two years, I have been involved with research, production systems, and early-stage startups.
At Octave-X, we are creating a multi-agent AI platform named ChromaFlow, which acquires production-ready applications from natural language prompts with compliance integrated as well.
The main emphasis of ChromaFlow is not only fastness but also steadiness. In fact, we are addressing a real issue here: ensuring that the output is secure, auditable, and can be used in the real world, even in regulated industries.
How does your business make money?
We use a tiered pricing SaaS subscription model. The plans at ChromaFlow vary from $49/month for solo developers to $499/month for enterprise teams. Besides, we offer Certus, our compliance automation tool, at $299/month for automated HIPAA, GDPR, and SOC 2 monitoring.
The subscription model works well for us as it offers recurring revenue that is predictable, and it also grows with the way customers use the platform. Those who use the platform heavily and, therefore, deploy more apps, will have to naturally move up the tiers. We’re turning our pilot users into paying customers, thus we are only a few steps away from completion.
What was your inspiration for starting the business?
I kept seeing teams invest months in building apps that could have been done in a few days, and then waiting another few months for compliance certifications before they could sell to enterprises. The distance between “I have an idea” and “I have a deployed, compliant product” seemed unreasonably large.
My co-founder, Desmend, and I met at a coding bootcamp three years ago, and this frustration was the thing that made us become great friends. We used to stay up late debugging, and we kept wondering: why is it so difficult to turn ideas into real apps? That question was the origin of Octave-X.
How and when did you launch the business?
In 2024, we formed a company and introduced ChromaFlow on Product Hunt, where we were ranked #30 overall. We were also ranked #3 on Tiny Startups in May 2025. However, to be honest, the actual launch was a lot quieter, just continuing to release features daily and showing them to users who would tell us what was not working.
We are located at 1871, Chicago’s startup hub, which has been excellent for connecting with other founders and getting the first feedback. The day one philosophy has been to continue releasing daily, even if it is not perfect. Your users will tell you what is important, but only if you give them something real to respond to.
Tell us about your team.
We’re a small group of four people, a combination of full-time and part-time employees working from different time zones. I am in charge of product and engineering. My co-founder, Desmend, is the head of operations and has more than 10 years of experience scaling the technology side at companies like Nordstrom and MIT.
We have chosen to remain lean. When you are bootstrapping and going against players like Lovable (which has raised $30M) and Bolt.new that are well-funded, you cannot outspend them. What you can do is out-ship them.
How are you funded?
We are bootstrapped. We have not raised any round up to this point, which I am proud of, because it made us build a real product instead of just making a nice sounding story in a pitch deck.
Nevertheless, we have linked arms with NVIDIA, AWS, Azure, OpenAI, and Auth0 for some strategic partnerships. We also welcomed a $25K OpenAI credits grant, which has been very helpful in keeping our AI infrastructure going without the need to spend cash.
As we want to grow, we’re talking with pre-seed investors. However, we first demonstrated that the model can be done without a loan from the bank.
How did you acquire your first customers?
We gained our first users through a launch on Product Hunt and Tiny Startups. Both communities consist of developers and indie hackers who are always looking for new tools to try and giving honest feedback. Our positions as #30 on Product Hunt and #3 on Tiny Startups helped us get noticed for the first time.
After that, it was mostly organic growth. Developers would get their hands on ChromaFlow, create something, and inform their friends about it. We didn’t do any advertising or aggressive marketing, just continued to release features and interaction with the users’ feedback were done promptly.
Another thing we did, which I’d suggest to any early-stage founde,r is that we allowed unlimited free usage without the need for a credit card. We wanted builders to try it, find its limits, and tell us what needed to be fixed. That strategy has led us to 500+ users, with about 20% of them being monthly active and retention.
Tell us about your primary driver(s) for growth. What worked for you in the beginning? What’s working now?
Initially it was all about how fast we could ship. We would very frequently, sometimes even multiple times a day, push updates. If a user found a bug or asked for a feature, they would be able to see it implemented within 24-48 hours. That responsiveness was the trust and word-of-mouth.
What differentiates us around compliance is how we’re working now. Most AI coding tools can do quick app generation, but the apps end up breaking in production and fail compliance reviews. We are the only platform where compliance is integrated into code generation from the very beginning. Healthcare and fintech teams—industries that require HIPAA and SOC 2—are the ones that eventually find us because we are the ones who solve the problem that no one else can.
Moreover, the collaborations with NVIDIA, AWS, and OpenAI are also comforting. The presence of these logos is a sign to the potential users that we are a serious player in the field.
What has been your biggest challenge so far, and what did you learn from it? How are you dealing with this issue today?
As a bootstrapped founder, it’s quite humbling to compete against startups that are well-funded. They can hire more rapidly, promote their product more aggressively, and take on the risks of making mistakes without much consequence.
What I learned is that you can’t win that game by playing it their way. You have to find an angle they’re not covering. Compliance is that for us. The big players are focusing on speed and developer experience. We’re focusing on “can this be done in a regulated environment?” That is a smaller market, but it’s one where we can be successful.
Can you tell us about any upcoming developments we can look forward to?
We are building Tenzin, which is our proprietary AI model that utilizes Homotopy Type Theory to produce formally verifiable code. So, Tenzin is not a statistical AI model like GPT or Claude that just gives you plausible code, but Tenzin will give you mathematically provable code. That is the reliability gap that we’re trying to close.
Additionally, we are widening the scope of Certus to include more compliance frameworks and also working on tighter bindings with enterprise tools. The idea is to turn compliance into something that goes on naturally in the background without the teams having to feel it.
How do you see your business evolving in the next 5 years?
After five years, my goal is Octave-X to be the standard platform for creating software that meets compliance requirements. However, this should not only be the case for startups but also for enterprise teams that need to work quickly while still abiding by the regulations.
The vision is: you give the description of what you need, ChromaFlow creates it, Certus certifies it, and Tenzin confirms that the code is doing exactly what it’s supposed to do. So, it’s an end-to-end process from the idea to production, with compliance being one of the ingredients.
If we perform well, we will handle thousands of enterprise deployments every month and will have spread to different markets such as healthcare IT, fintech, and government contracting, where compliance is mandatory.
What’s the biggest risk you’ve taken as a founder/entrepreneur?
When I was advised by everyone to raise money, I decided to remain bootstrapped. It’s a world of startups, where there is always a pressure to accept funding, to hire fast, and to grow at any cost. I made a decision to keep the team small and to show the model first.
We take the risk of moving slower than the competitors who are funded. The benefit to the company is that we hold the shares, we are not wasting the runway, and each decision is about creating something that can be sustained rather than just impressing investors with vanity metrics.
What tools do you use and recommend?
- Development: VS Code, GitHub, Cloudflare Pages, Supabase
- AI/ML: OpenAI API, Claude, Modal (for compute)
- Compliance: Our own Certus platform
- Communication: Slack, Linear for project management
- Design: Figma
For other founders: don’t overthink your stack. Pick tools that let you ship fast and switch later if needed.
What is your favorite quote?
“Ship daily, even when it’s imperfect.” It’s become our internal mantra.
What advice would you give to other aspiring entrepreneurs?
Start doing it even if you don’t feel prepared. There won’t ever be a perfect moment. Just do something, get feedback, and make changes. It’s much better to learn from 10 people who use a barely finished product than to plan for 6 months without doing anything.
Besides that, choose a problem that really matters to you. Creating a startup is still a tough thing even if you are passionate about the cause. If you are only following a market opportunity, you will stop when things get tough.