An Ex-Microsoft Engineer Raised $2.3 Million To Make Programming Super Simple

Chris Granger, a former Microsoft engineer and the founder of Light Table, a popular code editor that's one of the top 10 technology projects on Kickstarter, announced his newest venture. It's called Eve.

Eve a powerful database "that allows you to build anything from a simple website to complex algorithms." And users won't need any prior coding background: According to Granger, Eve is "our way of bringing the power of computation to everyone, not by making everyone a programmer but by finding a better way for us to interact with computers."

In a blog post Monday, Granger announced $2.3 million in seed funding from Andreessen Horowitz's Chris Dixon and Hunch engineer Tom Pinckney, among others. "Chris and Tom had plans to create a company like this and have been thinking about the problem ever since Microsoft killed [Visual Basic 6]," which was the company's programming language that was intended to be easy to use.

Other investors, like Y-Combinator president Sam Altman, MIT Media Lab director Sep Kamvar, and web developer Zubair Quraishi, all previously tried to make programming more accessible, as well.

This is the company's goal:

Imagine a world where everyone has access to computation without having to become a professional programmer - where a scientist doesn't have to rely on the one person in the lab who knows python, where a child could come up with an idea for a game and build it in a couple of weekends, where your computer can help you organize and plan your wedding/vacation/business. A world where programmers could focus on solving the hard problems without being weighed down by the plumbing. That is the world we want to live in. That is the world we want to help create with Eve.

Eve, according to Granger, will look similar to Microsoft Excel, in that it's more about reorganizing column and rows in tables to "program" what you want. But by creating a simple tool, Granger hopes Eve can be close "to the ideal we've always had of just describing what we want and letting the machine do the rest."

With the fresh seed round, Granger hopes to hire "a few new developers and a designer" to help answer one specific but difficult question: "how do you invite a billion people to program without them ever knowing about it?" The designer will be challenged to "own the personality and feel of Eve," while the engineers will focus on databases, queries, and "crazy UIs."

"We are stoked for the future that Eve and LT will create together and I hope you'll join us for the ride."

Disclosure: Marc Andreessen, co-founder of Andreessen Horowitz, is an investor in Business Insider.