Internal Software Is Built Badly Everywhere – That's the Business

01 /The Concept

Cogna built a platform where companies can create "highly personalized" software for themselves.

The specific use case is internal software – the custom platforms companies build to automate their own business processes.

Today companies have two options. They can use off-the-shelf tools – but those require workarounds, or mean living with functionality that doesn't quite fit. Or they can commission custom builds from external contractors or internal engineering teams – but that route is typically slow and expensive.

Cogna wants to occupy the middle ground. It doesn't sell finished products, and it doesn't do custom development. It gives companies a platform where they can build exactly what they need, purpose-built for their own context from day one.

With Cogna, companies get what they need 20x faster and at 10x lower cost than going to an external contractor.

The process starts with internal stakeholders describing to Cogna's AI engine the tool they want to build:

- The goals they want to achieve

- The specific tasks the software needs to handle

- The pain points and friction in how those tasks are handled today

The AI then generates a flowchart of the proposed software and a suggested feature set.

The requester can refine it:

- By removing specific features from the list

- Or by describing in plain language what they'd like changed

That loop repeats until the output matches what the requester actually has in mind.

Once the spec is locked, the AI generates the user interface – every screen of the application – which can also be refined through the same conversational feedback process.

Then the requester presses a button and gets a working application. The app integrates with existing IT infrastructure – internal databases, third-party platforms – out of the box.

If something doesn't work the way it should, the requester can ask the AI to modify it: add a feature, adjust a workflow, improve a screen. But the final guarantee comes from Cogna's human technical team, who provide 24/7 support to make sure every deployed application actually works in production.

Founded in the UK last year, Cogna has already closed a first funding round of £3.76M (approximately $4.83M).

02 /Why It Matters

At the conceptual level, Cogna didn't just build another SaaS – it showed what the future of custom software development could look like.

They could have built this platform for internal use only: take on the same custom development contracts as before, but use AI to dramatically reduce their cost of delivery. Pocket the margin.

But the biggest drain on any custom dev shop isn't the coding – it's the back-and-forth with clients trying to articulate what they actually want, followed by rounds of revisions as requirements evolve.

Custom development, meanwhile, is rarely built from scratch. It's mostly assembly: stitching together existing libraries and components, then adapting them to the client's context.

The real value of a development partner – and this is the counterintuitive part – is in the integration and ongoing support: making sure the finished software actually fits into the client's existing environment and keeps working over time.

Cogna took that insight and ran with it. Let the client define requirements through a dialogue with the platform. Let the AI assemble the application from existing components. Save Cogna's human capacity for what humans uniquely provide: the guarantee that the finished product works, the integration support, the ongoing maintenance.

The result: Cogna does what a development contractor does, but with far fewer people, handling far more clients, and in far less time. That's a scalable model.

The internal software market is enormous. Companies collectively spend $4.5 trillion annually on building, maintaining, and evolving their IT infrastructure. A significant portion of that goes to internal platforms and tools.

77% of companies with more than 500 employees have in-house developers, and those developers spend 30–45% of their time on internal tooling – a proportion that grows with company size.

Companies are clearly willing to pay for anything that reduces that drag.

Retool, [covered here](/review/50-jeto-ochen-mnogo) in 2022, built a visual builder for internal tools using pre-built component libraries – and raised $141M doing so.

Appsmith, [reviewed that same year](/review/neuzheli-proshhe-sozdavat-chem-pokupat), built a similar open-source platform and raised $51.5M.

Crowdbotics, [reviewed in early 2023](/review/vygodnee-chem-golaja-platforma), added AI-assisted spec generation, let companies reuse existing code components, offered marketplace access for missing pieces, and provided cloud hosting – all from one platform. It raised $68M.

Cogna is moving in the same direction but with a heavier bet on AI to generate complete, production-ready internal tools from scratch.

03 /Opportunities

The broad direction: build solutions that make internal software faster and cheaper for companies to create and maintain.

This market is large and will keep growing. Every company is being forced to become a digital company, and the internal tooling demands that come with that are growing alongside. Entering this space with AI capabilities at the current level – rather than trying to catch up later – is the right timing. Cogna, founded just last year, shows it's entirely doable.

Cogna also offers an interesting reference point for existing custom development shops. For them, this model isn't a competitive threat so much as a blueprint for what their own evolution could look like – scaling on a market they already know, with tools that didn't exist three years ago.

The internal software market is large and, frankly, unglamorous. Which means many founders avoid it. That's an opportunity for the ones who care more about market size than market sex appeal.