The Tool That's Making Mobile Developers' Lives 10x Easier

Just hunted Boxo AI on Product Hunt which offers a key missing puzzle piece for mobile app developers

Hey everyone 👋

Today, I wanted to publish a special featured interview on my newsletter that highlights the story and lessons from a founder friend of mine Kaniyet Rayev.

He’s the founder and CEO of Boxo AI — a platform that turns AI outputs into real, interactive features you can instantly launch inside of your existing app. Works with any AI code gen tools like Lovable, Bolt, v0 and Replit.

After previously serving top enterprises like Vodapay and Singapore Airlines, they’re now entering the startup market with Boxo AI. Today, I helped hunt them on Product Hunt and on that occasion, I sent him a few questions that I was genuinely curious about that I turned into an interview.

PS: Boxo AI is already trending at #1 rank worldwide on Product Hunt 😍 Here’s the direct link to show your support. Would love to get your quick feedback, upvotes, comments and suggestions :)

Anyway, here’s the transcript of my interview with Kaniyet. Enjoy!

Interview with Kaniyet Rayev CEO of Boxo

1. Who are you and what's your background?

I’m Kani, Co-Founder and CEO of Boxo. I was born in Kyrgyzstan, raised in Kazakhstan, and later studied in London, where I launched my first startup. I visited China in 2018 and was amazed by how amazing super apps are. I eventually moved to Singapore and founded Boxo to tackle a big problem I saw everywhere: how slow and complex it was to access new features in mobile apps, especially for teams with legacy stacks. With Boxo, we’re making that fast, flexible, and AI-ready.

2. Can you walk us through what Boxo AI does and which specific pain points it solves for mobile app developers?

Boxo turns AI-generated screens into real, interactive features you can instantly launch inside of your existing mobile app — whether you're using Swift, Kotlin, React Native, Flutter, or even Expo.

A lot of amazing tools like Lovable, Bolt, v0, and Replit can now generate beautiful UI in seconds. But until now, there’s been no way to actually use those screens inside a real mobile app — without rewriting code, refactoring, and deploying a full release. That’s the bottleneck we remove.

With Boxo, developers just paste a link, launch the screen as a miniapp, and go live — with native access to haptics, payments, auth, location, etc., all via our JS SDK.

3. How did the idea come about? What’s the potential you see with Boxo AI?

The turning point came when one of our customers asked us:

“What if we could use Boxo Miniapp Platform to launch AI-generated screens inside our app?”

That one question changed everything.

We had already built Boxo as a miniapp platform for apps with millions users — but this unlocked a whole new direction. We realized we could become the missing layer between powerful AI dev tools and legacy apps. We always thought App development should move at the speed of your ideas. And for that to happen, AI needs a delivery layer.

We believe Boxo can become the standard way to turn AI-generated features into real, interactive product experiences — super fast!

4. Can you share a few inflection points since the start of Boxo till date?

Our first inflection point was partnering with GCash — the largest wallet in the Philippines, with around 80 million users. We started with a single miniapp and ended up launching over 500, covering everything from grocery and pharmacy delivery to ecommerce and games. Imagine buying groceries directly inside Venmo or Cash App. That success opened the door for us to onboard 15 more major apps across the world.

Another key milestone was partnering with Koho — one of Canada’s top digital banks — who launched our eSIM miniapp and is now exploring additional use cases. This was our first big win in North America, proving that our product works just as well in North America and is ready for advanced tech environments.

Now, we hope this next launch marks another inflection point — one that accelerates feature development for mobile apps everywhere and for everyone. Personally, I’m incredibly excited to see what the developer community builds with Boxo.

5. What are some non-obvious learnings you’ve had being the market segment you’ve been in?

Enterprise isn’t always slow — When the value is clear and implementation is simple, even the biggest companies can move fast. We’ve seen it happen firsthand.

Conversational UX won’t replace UI — Even with powerful chat interfaces, users still need tappable, visual elements to get things done. UI isn’t disappearing — it’s evolving to surface only when needed.

Distribution is still the hardest part — Tools for building apps are improving fast, but distribution remains the biggest bottleneck. That’s where super apps can shine. In China, WeChat hosts over 3 million miniapps — creating built-in channels for new features and services to reach users instantly.

6. Looking beyond your Product Hunt launch, how do you see the relationship between traditional app development and AI-generated interfaces evolving over the next few years?

We’re moving toward hybrid workflows where AI tools generate the first draft — and developers and product managers can fine-tune and ship. The development cycle is shifting from “design > code > build > deploy” to “prompt > preview > edit > launch.”

Boxo makes that last step — launch — frictionless and super fast.

I actively encourage our engineers to leverage AI. We’ve set an unlimited budget for AI tools, and I assure them: AI won’t replace you — it’ll make you faster and more creative. That way, we can build and launch more, faster — which is exactly what Boxo is all about.

7. What’s some hard-earned advice you’d share with other founders building AI startups?

Build around a secret others don’t see. Models will keep evolving, tooling will get commoditized — but what sets you apart is the insight you have that others don’t. People don’t just use tools; they gravitate toward products (and founders) that understand something subtle, hard-earned, and deeply true about the workflow.

8. As you scale Boxo AI, what's your vision for how it might change the app development landscape in the next 3-5 years?

We see a future where apps aren’t static — they’re modular, fast, and constantly evolving.

Boxo helps apps scale like websites: with components and experiences you can plug in and update instantly. Our vision is that every mobile app has a miniapp layer — where new screens, features, and ideas can be launched in hours, not months.

We want to make shipping mobile apps as fast as building websites.

9. Where can people learn more about Boxo AI and its latest PH launch?

We’re live on Product Hunt right now! You can check out our launch here.

Would love your support and feedback 🙏

Also: follow us on Twitter/X at @boxoplatform or visit https://boxo.io/ai

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That’s a wrap for for this interview. Thanks for reading!