The inside story of how Silicon Valley’s hottest AI coding startup almost died

In 2017, Eric Simons founded StackBlitz with his childhood friend Albert Pai. Six years later, it was the startup equivalent of the walking dead.

StackBlitz raised funding to build software development tools, including WebContainers technology that let engineers create and manage projects in a browser, rather than on their laptops.

The business didn’t really take off, and by late 2023, things came to a head. StackBlitz…