AI Coding Startup Poolside Secures $500M in Series B Funding, Valuation Soars to $3 Billion

AI startup Poolside raises $500M as AI coding market booms

AI startup Poolside has raised a whopping $500mn -- and it still hasn't even launched a product. Despite the barren release schedule, the company has become an investors' darling. The new Series B round brings Poolside's total funding to $626mn. Its valuation now stands at a cool $3bn. The cash magnet is a AI-powered coding. Poolside has developed its own language model, which promises to accelerate software development. The company also boasts two eye-catching co-founders. CEO Jason Warner helped create GitHub Copilot, while CTO Eiso Kant is a serial founder of AI startups. At Poolside, the pair are building three things: foundation models, an API, and a coding assistant. According to Warner and Kant, the tech is currently undergoing "pressure-testing" in "the toughest" office environments. "The enterprise is the proving ground," they said in a blogpost. "But our goal is over time to make Poolside accessible to anyone in the world who wants to build software." Poolside is not the the only company with this objective. The market for AI coding assistants has become fiercely competitive, with Copilot at the lead and a range of challengers chasing. The emerging rivals are attracting major capital. August alone saw a $320mn investment in Magic, a $150mn round for Codeium, and a $60mn raise Anysphere. Replit, Augment, Supermaven, Cognition have also recently received big cash injections. Poolside's Series A adds another eye-watering sum to the sector. The round was led by Bain Capital Ventures, Bloomberg reports. Additional funds came from HSBC Ventures, DST Global, StepStone Group, and Citi Ventures. You can learn more about Poolside first-hand at VDS, one of Europe's premiere tech events. Poolside's VP of Operations, Margarida Garcia, is speaking at the show, which takes place in Valencia on October 23 and 24. TNW is a strategic partner at the event. Update (11:00PM CEST, October 3, 2024): A previous version of this article referred to Poolside as a "Paris startup." This was based on reports that the company had relocated to Paris. Poolside has now confirmed that it remains headquartered in San Francisco.

Paris startup Poolside raises $500M as AI coding market booms

Paris startup Poolside has raised a whopping $500mn -- and it still hasn't even launched a product. Despite the barren release schedule, the company has become an investors' darling. The new Series B round brings Poolside's total funding to $626mn. Its valuation now stands at a cool $3bn. The cash magnet is a AI-powered coding. Poolside has developed its own language model, which promises to accelerate software development. The company also boasts two eye-catching co-founders. CEO Jason Warner helped create GitHub Copilot, while CTO Eiso Kant is a serial founder of AI startups. At Poolside, the pair are building three things: foundation models, an API, and a coding assistant. According to Warner and Kant, the tech is currently undergoing "pressure-testing" in "the toughest" office environments. "The enterprise is the proving ground," they said in a blogpost. "But our goal is over time to make Poolside accessible to anyone in the world who wants to build software." Poolside is not the the only company with this objective. The market for AI coding assistants has become fiercely competitive, with Copilot at the lead and a range of challengers chasing. The emerging rivals are attracting major capital. August alone saw a $320mn investment in Magic, a $150mn round for Codeium, and a $60mn raise Anysphere. Replit, Augment, Supermaven, Cognition have also recently received big cash injections. Poolside's Series A adds another eye-watering sum to the sector.

Poolside raises $500M to take on GitHub and others with its AI coding assistants - SiliconANGLE

Artificial intelligence coding startup Poolside Inc., a rival to GitHub Inc.'s Copilot, said today it has closed on a bumper $500 million Series B raise. Today's funds came from Bain Capital Ventures, which led the round, and it was joined by a number of globally renowned companies, including eBay Inc., Nvidia Corp., Citi Ventures, HSBC Ventures and LG Technology Ventures, plus big name venture capital firms such as DST Global, StepStone Group, Schroders Capital, Premji Invest, Dorsal Capital, BAM Elevate, Adams Street and Fin Capital. The lengthy list of investors also included the startup's existing backers, Felicis Ventures and Redpoint Ventures, who led the company's $100 million Series A and $26 million seed rounds, respectively. The round brings Poolside's total amount raised to date to $626 million, and it's now valued at a cool $3 billion, according to a report in Bloomberg. The long list of investors and the huge amount of money raised suggests Poolside is onto something special with its generative AI-powered coding assistant models, which are an alternative to GitHub's popular Copilot. Indeed, there's every reason to think its technology should be just as good, if not better, for Poolside's co-founder and Chief Executive Jason Warner formerly worked as the Chief Technology Officer of GitHub, having previously headed engineering at Canonical Ltd. and Heroku Ltd. Warner's co-founder Eiso Kant, who is now Poolside's CTO, also has a strong pedigree, having previously founded a number of developer tech-focused startups. Poolside has developed its own generative AI coding models, designed to help developers with things like auto-completion of code and suggesting lines of code that are relevant in a particular context or for a specific codebase. The startup claims a number of Global 2000 companies as customers, though it has only disclosed a handful of them on its website. Where Poolside stands out from other AI coding rivals is through its reinforcement learning-based approach to training its models. Reinforcement learning enables its models to learn over time based on code execution feedback, so they will constantly improve as they complete millions of tasks in real-world software projects. The startup is also building a custom stack, or software toolkit for AI training tasks, complete with features that enable researchers to manage the datasets used in their machine learning projects. Its software also includes tools for automating tasks such as measuring the accuracy of newly-built large language models. In a statement, Warner said he believes that only a handful of companies will eventually achieve what's known as "artificial general intelligence", which is a more advanced form of AI that can effectively think and learn by itself, in the same way as humans can. AGI is exactly what Poolside claims to be building. "We believe software development will be the first broad capability where AI will reach and surpass human-level intelligence," Warner said. "Through our team, our applied research and a powerful revenue engine, Poolside will bring AI for software development so that anyone in the world can build." Poolside added that the money from today's round is already being put to use, as it has already invested in a batch of 10,000 Nvidia graphics processing units for training its future models. The funds will also help to boost its go-to-market and research and development initiatives, the company said. Although there remain serious concerns about the security and reliability of AI code generation tools, with many thought to be guilty of plagiarizing existing code, developers have shown lots of enthusiasm for them. In a recent poll by GitHub, an overwhelming majority of respondents said they're using AI tools to assist their development work. GitHub itself has accumulated more than 1.8 million paying users for its Copilot assistant. Poolside isn't the only AI coding startup to attract megabucks from VCs either. Its rivals include Magic AI Inc., which bagged $200 million in fresh funding in July, and there are many others, such as Augment Inc., which closed on a hefty $227 million Series B round that lifted its valuation to $977 million. Meanwhile, Cognition AI Inc., creator of Devin, closed on a $175 million funding round led by Founders Fund in March, bringing its value to $2 billion.

AI-Coding Startup Poolside Raises Massive $500M Series B

The startup builds artificial intelligence software for programmers. "Only a handful of companies will reach (artificial general intelligence) -- and they are being forged at this very moment," said Poolside CEO Jason Warner in a release. "We believe software development will be the first broad capability where AI will reach and surpass human-level intelligence. Through our team, our applied research, and a powerful revenue engine, poolside will bring AI for software development so that anyone in the world can build." The company has raised $626 million since May 2023. Poolside is just one of a handful of big deals recently in the AI coding space. In August, San Francisco-based Magic, which also develops AI models to write software, raised a $320 million round from new investors including Eric Schmidt and Sequoia. The announcement came nearly two months after Reuters reported the company was in talks with investors to raise a fresh $200 million at a $1.5 billion valuation. Also in August, AI-powered coding assistant Codeium closed a $150 million Series C round led by General Catalyst that values the Mountain View, California-based startup at $1.25 billion. Codeium's platform uses generative AI models trained on public code to give developers suggestions for building apps, and can support dozens of programming languages.

AI coding startup Poolside raises $500M from eBay, Nvidia and others

The cash came in the form of a Series B led by Bain Capital Ventures, which also had participation from a who's who of big tech firms including eBay (via eBay Ventures) and Nvidia. It brings Poolside's total raised to $626 million; Bloomberg reports that the startup's valuation now sits at $3 billion. TechCrunch revealed this summer that Poolside was in the midst of raising substantial funding. "We believe software development will be the first broad capability where AI will reach and surpass human-level intelligence," Poolside CEO Jason Warner said in a press release. "Through our team, our applied research, and a powerful revenue engine, poolside will bring AI for software development so that anyone in the world can build." U.S.- and Europe-based Poolside was founded last year by Warner and Eiso Kant, both software engineers. Warner is the former CTO of GitHub, having also headed engineering orgs at Canonical and Heroku. Kant previously co-founded several dev-focused startups, including engineering analytics venture Athenian. Warner, who incubated GitHub's AI-powered Copilot tool, met Kant in 2017. Over the next six years, the pair plotted an AI-driven assistive tool suite for devs, which became Poolside. Poolside develops its own AI models to help with tasks like autocompleting code and suggesting code possibly relevant to a particular context or codebase -- much like other AI assistive coding tools. The company's customers are primarily Global 2000 companies and public-sector agencies. The Series B funding allowed Poolside to bring 10,000 Nvidia GPUs online to train future models, Warner said, and to bolster the company's go-to-market and R&D efforts. Despite the security, copyright and reliability concerns around AI-powered assistive coding tools, developers have shown enthusiasm for them, with the vast majority of respondents in GitHub's latest poll saying that they've adopted AI tools in some form. GitHub reported in April that Copilot had over 1.8 million paying users and more than 50,000 business customers. Encouraged by the adoption, AI coding startups are raising big bucks. Generative AI coding firm Magic landed $320 million in August -- the same day GitHub Copilot competitor Codeium closed a $150 million funding round. Earlier in August, Cognition, best known for its viral coding assistant called Devin, secured $175 million at a $2 billion valuation. Polaris Research projects that the AI coding tools market could be worth some $27 billion by 2032. LG Technology Ventures, Felicis Ventures, Redpoint Ventures, Citi Ventures, Capital One Ventures, HSBC Ventures, DST Global, StepStone Group, Schroders Capital, Premji Invest, Dorsal Capital, BAM Elevate, Adams Street, and Fin Capital also invested in Poolside's Series B.