Why Choose Clark for Enterprise Software Development?

For all the talk of AI transformation, some of the most expensive engineering work inside the enterprise is still spent on rebuilding the same software over and over with tools no customer will ever see.

“These weren’t side projects,” said Brad Menezes, CEO and co-founder of Superblocks, in an interview with AIM Media House. “They were the backbone of operations. But companies were burning massive engineering cycles reinventing the wheel over and over.”

Before launching Superblocks, Menezes led product at Datadog and worked closely with Fortune 100 enterprises. What he observed was a recurring inefficiency: internal applications critical to finance, support, compliance, and onboarding were being built and rebuilt by engineering teams with little tooling standardization or enterprise oversight. These apps were costly to maintain, slow to deploy, and treated as operational baggage rather than strategic assets.

“Companies are dedicating 30 percent or more of their engineering capacity just to build and maintain internal tools,” Menezes said. “That’s expensive, slow, and unsustainable.”

Founded in 2021 by Menezes and Ran Zhou, Superblocks began as a programmable platform for internal apps. As large language models matured, the company shifted toward a fully AI-native approach. They launched with Clark, a generative AI agent that creates secure, full-stack enterprise applications from natural language prompts.

Turning Domain Experts into Builders

“No one was solving this because internal software had always been treated as a cost center, not a platform opportunity,” Menezes told AIM Media House. “We saw that blind spot and now with AI, we can shift that paradigm entirely by turning domain experts into builders.”

Superblocks allows teams to go from idea to production in hours, not months. Clark generates frontend and backend code, APIs, and database queries in response to plain-language requests. It also applies enterprise-grade security standards out of the box including SSO, RBAC, and audit logging.

“Engineering still owns the system,” Menezes said, “but now ops, IT, and business teams can build without the bottleneck.”

Production-Grade AI, Not Prototype Tools

Asked what differentiates Clark from other AI coding tools like Replit, Lovable, or Bolt, Menezes emphasized a single point: production-readiness.

“Most vibe coding tools optimize for prototypes. Clark was built for production apps,” he said. “It generates full-stack React apps that are fully extensible and meet enterprise standards out of the box.”

All code generated by Clark is version-controlled and auditable. Apps can be deployed inside the customer’s secure infrastructure or VPC, and the entire development lifecycle can be governed internally.

Healthcare Use Cases and Quantifiable Outcomes

In healthcare, Clark is already replacing manual workflows. “We’re seeing strong demand for tools like claims processing apps, patient onboarding workflows, and custom EHR dashboards,” Menezes said.

At Synapse Health, the platform replaced the equivalent work of 5 to 7 engineers by enabling their team to rapidly build HIPAA-compliant tools. In one case, as Hurricane Helene approached the southeastern U.S., Synapse used Superblocks to build and deploy an internal messaging system that proactively reached tens of thousands of patients with emergency instructions.

“It was a powerful example of how Superblocks can be mobilized in a crisis,” Menezes said.

Legacy systems like EHRs or fragmented backend databases are often difficult to replace. Superblocks is built to integrate, not disrupt.

Superblocks is designed to operate as an extension of existing tooling rather than a replacement. Given that legacy systems like EHRs and fragmented backends are unlikely to disappear, the platform integrates seamlessly by connecting to any API or database.

AI-Native from the Ground Up

The company's architecture is a clean break from traditional low-code platforms. Instead of layering AI onto legacy workflows, Superblocks rebuilt its development process with AI as the foundation. “We didn’t just add a chatbot to an old UI builder,” Menezes said. “Clark is embedded across every phase of the software lifecycle—from spec writing and data integration to frontend generation and deployment.”

But speed alone isn’t the goal. “What’s equally important is that we’ve built governance into every step of that process. Enterprises need velocity, but they also need control,” he said. That architectural focus has become one of Superblocks’ clearest differentiators. That architectural focus on governance has become one of Superblocks’ clearest differentiators.

Superblocks acknowledges the critiques around “vibe coding”, the trend of using AI to generate fast, sometimes throwaway code.

“AI should empower engineers and domain experts, not replace judgment or rigorous architecture,” Menezes said. “Clark can generate a working app from a prompt, but that’s only 80 percent of the work. Engineers are needed to refine and complete the final 20 percent in their IDE.”

Clark supports editing in developer environments like VS Code, Cursor, and Windsurf. Superblocks refers to this model as "enterprise vibe coding": fast and intuitive, but governed, extensible, and compliant.

One of the most unexpected uses came from Synapse Health, which used Clark during a hurricane to reach patients with emergency instructions. “It wasn’t just about productivity,” Menezes said. “It was about response time, safety, and reliability.”

Superblocks vs. Retool and Appsmith

Asked how Superblocks compares to other internal tooling platforms like Retool or Appsmith, Menezes pointed to the underlying architecture.

“Appsmith and Retool make it easy to spin up simple UIs quickly, but they struggle when it comes to extensibility and scalability,” he said. “Their proprietary backends limit flexibility. Superblocks generates flexible, fully extensible React code under the hood.”

The Databricks Partnership

Shortly after launching Clark, Superblocks was announced as the lead partner for Databricks Apps at the 2025 Data + AI Summit. The integration allows users to connect Clark to Databricks SQL, Mosaic AI, Lakehouse data, and apply access policies using Unity Catalog.

“We saw an immediate fit between what Databricks and Superblocks unlock,” Menezes said. “One customer built a fraud detection dashboard powered by Databricks and deployed it across teams without needing a dedicated frontend team.”

Databricks VP of Product Management Shanku Niyogi noted, “Our customers have invested in building a data and AI foundation in Databricks, and are increasingly turning to applications to help democratize those investments. With Superblocks, they’re able to accelerate the development of these data and AI applications, without sacrificing security and governance.”

Superblocks has raised $60 million to date, including a $37 million Series B led by Kleiner Perkins. It counts Instacart and Papaya Global among its customers, and internally mandates that only the core product engineering team writes code, everyone else builds their own tools using Clark.

“Success means making it possible for every employee to build mission-critical apps safely and securely,” Menezes said. “We want Clark to be the default starting point for internal software development in the enterprise.”