Graphite Secures $52M in Series B Funding to Advance AI-Powered Code Review Platform

Anthropic-backed AI-powered code review platform Graphite raises cash

AI coding assistants are becoming wildly popular, with the vast majority of respondents in GitHub's latest poll saying that they've adopted AI tools in some form. Y Combinator partner Jared Friedman recently claimed that a quarter of YC's W25 startup batch have 95% of their codebases generated by AI. Sensing an opportunity, VCs are rushing to back startups developing AI-powered assistive programming tools. One of these startups, Graphite, on Tuesday announced that it raised $52 million in a Series B round led by Accel with participation from Anthropic's Anthology Fund with Menlo Ventures, Shopify Ventures, Figma Ventures, Andreessen Horowitz and The General Partnership. Tomas Reimers, Greg Foster, and Merrill Lutsky founded Graphite in 2020. Reimers is an ex-Facebook software dev, whereas Foster was an engineer at Airbnb and Google. Lutsky previously founded Posmetrics, a customer feedback solutions firm. Graphite began its life as a mobile development tooling company, but it pivoted to code review shortly after opening up shop. Today, Graphite's platform gives feedback on code, leveraging AI -- specifically Anthropic's and OpenAI's models -- to flag errors and possible oversights. "Graphite started as an internal tool we built to solve our own pain around code review," Lutsky told TechCrunch. "We shared what we built with a few ex-Meta engineers, who quickly shared it more broadly, and soon the demand for Graphite became too loud to ignore." Graphite also suggests code changes from developer comments on codebases, summarizes code, and generates possible fixes for code failures. For the startup's next act, Graphite is spinning out Diamond, an AI tool designed to catch coding bugs and errors automatically, as a standalone product. There's a lot of competition in the AI coding assistant space. Beyond GitHub Copilot and well-funded efforts like Cursor maker Anysphere, Poolside, Augment, Magic, and Codeium, startups CodeRabbit and DeepCode both focus specifically on AI-powered code review applications. OpenAI recently updated its macOS ChatGPT app to directly edit code in popular app dev tools, and Anthropic -- one of Graphite's financial backers -- has an assistive programming tool of its own. Graphite has managed to carve out a niche for itself, however, partly by working to allay customers' fears of the reliability risks associated with AI-powered assistive coding tools. Unlike some tools on the market, Graphite lets customers define patterns unique to a codebase and set up filters for sensitive information that might compromise a codebase's security. "Revenue grew 20x in 2024, and we've scaled to serving tens of thousands of engineers at more than 500 companies, including Shopify, Snowflake, Figma, and Perplexity," Lutsky said. "Combined with our revenue growth, this new funding gives us many years of runway, a clear path to profitability, and the resources to invest aggressively in growth and AI." To make its platform even more attractive, Graphite has made its core code review offering free for teams of all sizes. Previously, only groups of 10 or fewer could use the company's tools at no charge. With the latest round of funding, Graphite has raised around $81 million in venture capital to date. The 30-person startup says that the newest tranche will be put toward product development and growing its NYC-based team.

AI code assist startup Graphite raises $52M to try and keep ahead of the competition - SiliconANGLE

AI code assist startup Graphite raises $52M to try and keep ahead of the competition New York City-based artificial intelligence code review startup Graphite, officially known as Screenplay Studios Inc., said today it has raised $52 million in a Series B round of funding. Today's round was led by Accel and saw participation from Menlo Ventures through Anthology Fund, which is a $100 million initiative launched in partnership with the AI giant Anthropic PBC. A host of other high-profile backers, including Shopify Ventures, Figma Ventures, Andreessen Horowitz and The General Partnership were also involved in the round. Graphite was founded in 2020 by its Chief Executive Merrill Lutsky and others in early 2020, when it began life as a mobile development tooling company, but shortly after it entered that business it pivoted to focus on code review. Nowadays, it uses AI agents to automate that code review processes, providing feedback that aims to flag errors and other oversights as developers are compiling fresh code. The startup's code reviewer is called Diamond and it's powered by large language models from Anthropic and OpenAI. It works by automatically summarizing pull requests, transforming comments into actionable code suggestions. Through its instantaneous, high-signal feedback, the company claims Diamond is able to catch everything from bugs to logic errors to style inconsistencies and security vulnerabilities. In addition to catching these problems, Diamond will suggest changes based on human developer's comments on codebases. It can also summarize sections of code to explain what the intent or purpose is. Diamond sounds impressive, but it's worth noting that Graphite faces intense competition from dozens of other AI coding assistants. Its biggest rival is GitHub Inc.'s Copilot, and then there are dozens of other startups, including Poolside Inc., Augment Inc., Magic AI Inc. and Codeium Inc. There are much bigger players too, such as OpenAI, which recently introduced code editing tools in its macOS ChatGPT application, Google LLC has its Code Assist tools, and Anthropic has its own assistive programming tool too. Despite these challengers, Graphite has won over plenty of developers by reassuring them of the reliability of its code suggestions. Unlike many of those other tools, users can define patterns that are unique to any single codebase, then set up filters to catch sensitive information that might compromise its security. Rama Sekhar of Menlo Ventures said Graphite's Diamond "sets a new standard for code review, ensuring teams can trust and scale AI-generated code." Whatever the reason, Graphite appears to be growing pretty fast. It claims to have grown its revenue by more than 20 times in the last year, scaling its platform to serve engineers at more than 500 companies, including Shopify Inc., Snowflake Inc. and Perplexity AI Inc. To increase the attractiveness of its platform, Graphite is making its core code review offering freely available to teams of all sizes, having previously only allowed free access to teams of 10 or less. Looking ahead, Graphite said it plans to use the money from today's round to accelerate product development and grow its New York-based team. "Graphite is becoming the go-to tool for the world's most forward-thinking engineering teams," said Accel Partner Christine Esserman. "It's becoming the canonical layer where humans and agents collaborate on code."