Seattle startup Prom.dev is emerging from stealth with $1.5 million in funding to build a platform for sharing and discovering AI prompts. Pioneer Square Labs and Mayfield led the pre-seed round.
Founded in November, the startup is betting that “prompts are the new software,” as described by CEO and founder Heather Jackson, a former Amazon product leader who recently sold a gaming company.
Prom turns AI prompts — the instructions people give tools like ChatGPT — into shareable artifacts that function more like lightweight apps.
“Everyone is building with AI, but there’s no GitHub, there’s no app store — there’s no way to actually share what you’ve made,” Jackson said. “Prom is that layer.”
On the platform, users can bring in a prompt they’ve been using, add design elements and input fields, and publish it as a shareable artifact. A prompt might become a form with inputs and outputs, a static page that tracks stock performance daily, or a simulation where an AI persona critiques your startup pitch. Once published, other users can discover it, use it, and remix it into their own version — an open-source ethos applied to the prompt world.
“We’re kind of like if GitHub and Pinterest had a baby — that’s where we sit in terms of usability,” Jackson said.
While Prom is initially targeting developers, Jackson said the platform is designed to bridge the gap between power users and people who are just getting started with AI. Someone who doesn’t know how to write a great prompt can find one on Prom, use it, and tweak it.
Jackson sees room for Prom in the current AI tools landscape. She doesn’t consider major AI companies like OpenAI or Anthropic as likely competitors. Those companies are focused on building models and selling to enterprises, she argued — not on fostering open communities of builders.
“Who is incentivized to build a community space? Who is incentivized to create a voice for AI?” she said. “I don’t see anyone building that way.”
For now, Prom is free, and Jackson said she’s focused on attracting the best content to the platform before adding paid features. She envisions a business model similar to GitHub’s: free for public sharing, with paid tiers for private team workspaces and heavier usage.
Jackson, who grew up in a small town in Kentucky, said her background shaped a passion for building community. After graduating from Vanderbilt, she joined Restaurant Brands International, worked in operations and technology at Burger King and Tim Hortons, earned an MBA from Harvard, and later moved to Seattle to work in Amazon Games, where she focused on social gaming and network effects.
She later founded Astra Logical, a strategy-focused video game publisher that shipped more than a dozen titles and reached more than 2 million players before being acquired in October. While running Astra, she built internal AI workflows and collected prompts in Notion to share with her team — an experience that helped spark Prom.
Alex Ray, a partner at PSL, sees Prom as infrastructure for a shift in how software is created.
“For the past 20 years, we’ve shipped code as static, versioned apps,” Ray said. “Prompts can be more dynamic, almost alive: prompt-based software can constantly adapt to your exact use case on a moment’s notice. Prom is the infrastructure that enables that dynamic software.”
Seattle-based PSL and Mayfield, a longtime Silicon Valley venture firm, partnered in 2024 to fund early stage AI startups.
Jackson is currently a solo founder, working out of Foundations and other Seattle tech spaces. She said activating the local AI community is a central to her mission.
“We’ve got to make AI in Seattle fun,” she said.
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