Tessl Raises $125M to Revolutionize AI-Driven Software Development

AI-powered developer tooling startup Tessl raises $125M - SiliconANGLE

Tessl AI Ltd., a startup using artificial intelligence to streamline software development and maintenance, today announced that it has raised $125 million in funding. The bulk of the capital, $100 million, arrived in the form of a recent Series A round led by Index Ventures. Accel chipped in as well. Tessl earlier raised a $25 million seed investment that was jointly led by boldstart and Alphabet Inc.'s GV startup fund. The company is now reportedly valued at $750 million. London-based Tessl is developing an AI platform that will make it possible to create software with natural language prompts. According to the company, the plan is enabling users to describe the application they wish to build in a high-level specification. Tessl's algorithms will automatically turn customers' specifications into code. The platform will generate Java, JavaScript and Python code on launch. Java powers many enterprise applications, while JavaScript and Python are widely used for web development and AI projects, respectively. Tessl plans to add support for more languages down the line. Besides generating software, the platform will also help developers maintain it. According to Tessl, its algorithms will be capable of automatically detecting any performance issues that may emerge in an application over time and fix them. The company also plans to offer features for spotting cybersecurity issues. Guy Podjarny, Tessl's founder and Chief Executive Officer, previously launched software security specialist Snyk Ltd. The latter startup received a $7.4 billion valuation in its most recent funding round. Tessl's software maintenance features won't be limited to fixing security and performance issues. According to the company, its AI will also be capable of detecting changes in the external components on which a program depends to work. Enterprise applications often interact with external services through application programming interfaces, or APIs. An API can change over time as the application to which it provides accessed is updated with new features. When such changes occur, the workloads that rely on the API must be modified as well, a task Tessl hopes to streamline with its platform. The company plans to add support for more use cases over time. According to Tessl, the plan is to equip its platform with the ability to collect telemetry about an application and analyze the data to identify areas for improvement. "Implementations will be customizable, refined to your specific environment based on your data, and enabling dynamic changes like prioritized speed at peak hours vs costs overnight," Podjarny wrote in a blog post today. Tessl expects to launch the platform in early 2025. According to the company, it will allow customers to build more sophisticated applications than competing coding assistants. Tessl envisions developers using its platform to build a variety of services including web and mobile apps. The company's funding milestone comes weeks after Poolside, another startup in the process of building an AI-powered coding platform, disclosed a $500 million raise. It used the capital to build a cluster of 10,000 Nvidia Corp. graphics cards. The chips will enable Poolside to train large language models optimized for coding tasks.

Tessl raises $125 million to transform AI software development

Tessl, a promising startup aiming to reshape the coding landscape, has successfully raised $125 million in funding to accelerate its AI-driven platform's development. Founded by Guy Podjarny, the company envisions a world where developers can communicate in natural language for software specifications, allowing AI to handle the nitty-gritty of coding, debugging, and maintenance. The funding raised by Tessl consists of a $25 million seed round in April, backed by GV (formerly Google Ventures) and boldstart, along with an additional $100 million Series A led by Index Ventures. Notably, other prominent investors such as Accel Partners, GV, and boldstart joined the Series A round. This financial backing values the startup at $750 million, affirming robust confidence in its potential from seasoned venture capitalists. Podjarny, who has a history of successful ventures -- including Akamai and Snyk -- positions Tessl as an innovative player in the increasingly crowded field of AI coding tools. He noted that current solutions, like Microsoft-owned GitHub's Copilot, focus primarily on streamlining existing workflows while Tessl aims for a more fundamental shift in software development. In Podjarny's vision, the role of a software developer will pivot from intricate coding tasks to prevailing over the overarching design and functionality of applications. Tessl encourages developers to articulate what they want applications to do, allowing AI to interpret those directions into code. This approach offers developers more strategic thinking time, as they become akin to systems architects rather than being bogged down by coding minutiae. At its core, Tessl's platform seeks to facilitate a "spec-centric" process. This means developers can explicitly define what correctness looks like for their desired applications. They would specify high-level equations to optimize aspects such as performance and cost-efficiency, allowing Tessl's AI to address the underlying technical details. Podjarny offered an example where an application could shift between different coding languages and architectures depending on traffic demands throughout the day. Currently, Tessl employs a team of 21 and is in the process of testing multiple preliminary versions of its coding assistant with select internal and external users. However, the platform is not yet available for general sale, with a rollout anticipated in 2025. In preparation, Tessl has launched a waitlist for developers interested in getting early access to the platform. To foster a community of "AI native" developers, Tessl invites programmers to build relationships centered around this next-gen software design paradigm. The startup's foresight lies in addressing the challenges created by the rising complexity of code generated by various AIs, which amplifies risks related to security and maintenance. Podjarny's new venture is aptly named Tessl, a reference to "tessellation," emphasizing the goal of ensuring code integrates seamlessly rather than functioning chaotically. Podjarny's strategy points to collaboration over competition with other AI coding platforms. He's keen on creating a system that works seamlessly with existing AI development environments, indicating Tessl's potential to adopt and enhance AI-generated code from various sources. This interoperability suggests that while Tessl will compete with notable AI assistants like Cognition's Devin and Codeium, it also aims to integrate into broader ecosystems for a smoother development experience. In its initial stages, the platform plans to support programming languages like Java, JavaScript, and Python, with intentions to expand its repertoire as it scales. The vast investor confidence displayed in Tessl highlights a growing recognition of the necessity for comprehensive tools that not only write code but also maintain it over time, ensuring a consistent and secure software environment. Carlos Gonzalez-Cadenas, a partner at Index Ventures, echoed this excitement by praising Podjarny's capability to understand developer communities and his vision for transforming how software development is approached. He emphasized that Tessl isn't merely a tool but part of a broader movement to reshape the coding landscape in a more collaborative and optimized manner. Tessl's ambitious plans signal not just a shift in how coding is done but potentially a new era of software design that emphasizes ease, security, and integration, all driven by the power of AI.

Tessl raises $125M at at $500M+ valuation to build AI that writes and maintains code

Many startups and larger tech companies have taken a crack at building artificial intelligence to code software. Now, another new player is coming out of the shadows to throw its hat into the ring, with a mission to fix the many problems that will arise when humans and all those AIs are all writing code together. Tessl is building what it describes as an "AI native" platform that developers and their teams can use to create and maintain software, and it's today opening up a waitlist for those interested in trying it out. "Is building" is being used very specifically here: Tessl's product has yet to launch (the plan is to have it out by early next year). But the London-based startup is sharing a bit more about what it's doing with some financial fanfare. Tessl has quietly raised $125 million across a seed round and a Series A, both being announced for the first time today. The latest round is led by Index Ventures, with Accel, GV, and boldstart participating. GV (aka Google Ventures) and boldstart co-led the seed. TechCrunch has confirmed with multiple sources that Tessl's post-money valuation is north of $500 million. As you might have surmised, one reason why a company without customers nor a shipped product is getting this kind of attention from top-shelf VCs is because of who is building it. The CEO and founder is Guy Podjarny, a developer whisperer of sorts. His last startup was Snyk, a cybersecurity firm that was last valued (in 2022) at $7.4 billion. Before that, he was the CTO of Akamai, a role he took after Akamai had acquired his first startup, Blaze, which focused on speeding up website loading times. "Podjarny is incredibly visionary and thoughtful about his business," said Carlos Gonzalez-Cadenas, the partner at Index who led on the investment, in an interview with TechCrunch. "He's very, very good [at understanding] developer communities and building developer oriented businesses." Podjarny said in an interview that the concept for Tessl came out of his experience at Snyk. The latter firm's focus is on detecting (and fixing) security vulnerabilities in code, and Podjarny saw a similar issue getting more urgent with code and software interoperability overall -- in particular because of the rapid expansion of code written automatically by AIs. "What is AI doing to software development?" he said he asked himself. The answer was: speeding it up, but also creating much more of it automatically. And the process of maintaining and shipping updates to that code would compound the complexity and chances of systems breaking. This ends up having a lot of bad implications (security, uptime, cost, efficiency) for organizations. "The more that picture formed in my mind, the more I knew I would build this." (The name Tessl is a reference to "tessellation", Podjarny said: the aim is to make sure that software and the code behind it fit neatly together, rather than exist in a messy, overlapping jumble.) Podjarny was cagey about giving out too many specifics about what kinds of applications or code he envisions being built, or maintained, on Tessl. But it sounds like while the ambition sounds big, it will actually start small. "We're not sharing the full strategy yet on on what that is," he said of target applications or use cases. "I would say that we're not starting with games. We're starting with relatively simple software that that allows us to build an end to end system that is more manageable for LLMs to generate, and more manageable for humans to specify. And we will evolve from there." The basic idea behind what the startup is doing goes something like this: developers and their teams (which can include product managers and others that typically do not write code themselves) can provide specifications to Tessl. These can be in the form of natural language, or code itself. Those specifications can then be used to Tessl to write new code to meet that specification. After that, Tessl can be automated to maintain that code to that specification: meaning, if something else runs the risk of breaking because of that new code, Tessl will run remediation to identify and fix that. It sounds like Tessl is not being conceived as a walled garden. Podjarny said that he's talking to others that have built or are building AI coding assistants, with the idea that the work these other platforms produce will also be maintainable using Tessl. It will aim initially to support Java, Javascript and Python, with further languages getting added over time, Podjarny added. One reason why investors love the idea and are backing it is because of that extensibility. "He's building a system of record here," Gonzalez-Cadenas said. "Once you do that, there is a variety of opportunities."

Tessl worth a reported $750 million and announces $125 million in funding to try to transform software development

Tessl, a startup founded by a veteran entrepreneur who wants to use AI to revamp how computer programmers design, code, and maintain software, has raised $125 million across two previously undisclosed funding rounds. The company said it raised a $25 million seed round in April from GV (formerly Google Ventures) and venture capital firm boldstart. Today, it announced it has secured an additional $100 million Series A venture capital round, led by Index Ventures. Accel Partners, GV, and boldstart also participated in the latest funding. The latest funding round values the startup at $750 million, according to people with knowledge of the deal's structure. The company is the brainchild of Guy Podjarny, who is often known by the handle "Guypo." He previously served as chief technology officer at internet infrastructure company Akamai, after his startup Blaze.io was acquired by that firm, and then founded Snyk.io, a company that automatically finds security flaws in software and suggests ways to patch them. Podjarny says that his vision for Tessl is to use AI to let software designers specify the functions and features of the programs they wish to create in natural language and then have AI models take care of the rest. The market for AI coding assistants is increasingly crowded. Microsoft-owned GitHub offers its GitHub Copilot software, which can complete lines of code and has proved popular with coders. There is also Cognition, a startup whose coding assistant Devin can create entire programs from natural language prompts. And these are just two of a dozen AI-based applications -- from companies such as Codeium to Replit to Tabnine -- that offer AI assistance to software programmers. But Podjarny says these other AI coding copilots are not ambitious enough. "These AI dev tools are very much focused on automating the existing workflow," he told Fortune. He says that these tools are all "code-centric" and "code dependent." Podjarny imagines a world in which the high-level specifications of what the program is supposed to do becomes the primary surface on which a software developer works, with all the questions about how the program accomplishes this goal left largely up to AI. Critically, the AI model will also handle debugging the code it writes, doing security testing of that code, and maintaining that code over time. In this new paradigm, the software developer becomes much like a systems architect or a product manager, thinking about the big picture of what the software needs to do and what it needs to interact with, rather than getting involved in the specifics of how exactly the software accomplishes those goals, Podjarny said. "Being spec-centric means you define what you want, and that includes definitions of what correctness looks like -the core definitions of how the system should behave," he said. This would be different for a mobile game than, say, SaaS software. A developer could specify that it wanted the application to prioritize latency during peak hours of usage, and to be more cost sensitive during less busy hours, for instance. And, as a result, the application might in fact use completely different code bases, written in different programming languages, at different points in the day. London-based Tessl currently employs 21 people and has built two preliminary versions of its coding assistant, which it is testing internally and with a group of select external users. But it is not yet ready, Podjarny says, to begin selling the software to paying customers. It said it hoped to begin offer the product to customers in 2025 and announced that it was currently opening a waitlist for those who wanted to sign up to try Tessl. It also said it was inviting software developers to join the community of "AI native" developers that it is seeking to foster. Carlos Gonzalez-Cadenas, a partner at Index Ventures, said the firm had known Podjarny for years and believed he had both the entrepreneurial chops and the vision to make Tessl a success. Podjarny has "a great track record of catalyzing cultural change in how developers work," Gonzalez-Cadenas said in a statement. "What he's building with Tessl isn't just a tool, but a movement to change how software gets made.'