The AI startup Poolside has raised a whopping $500 million – and hasn't even brought a product to market yet.
Despite the meager release schedule, the company has become a darling of investors. The new Series B round increases Poolside's total funding $626 million. The review is now in a cool $3 billion.
The cash magnet is AI-powered coding. Poolside has developed its own language model that promises to accelerate software development.
The company also boasts two eye-catching co-founders. CEO Jason Warner helped found GitHub Copilot, while CTO Eiso Kant is one of the founders of AI startups.
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At Poolside, the two develop three things: base models, an API and a coding assistant.
According to Warner and Kant, the technology is currently being “pressure tested” in the “toughest” office environments.
“The company is the proving ground,” they said in a blog post. “But our goal over time is to make Poolside accessible to anyone in the world who wants to develop software.”
Poolside isn't the only company with this goal. The AI coding assistant market is highly competitive, with Copilot leading the way and a number of challengers hot on its heels.
The emerging competitors are attracting big capital. In August alone, $320 million was invested in Magic $150 million round for Codeium and a $60 million increase Anysphere. Replit, Augment, Supermaven and Cognition have also recently received large financial injections.
Poolside's Series A adds another eye-popping sum to the sector.
According to Bloomberg, the round was led by Bain Capital Ventures. Additional funding came from HSBC Ventures, DST Global, StepStone Group and Citi Ventures.
You can find out more about Poolside first-hand at VDS, one of Europe's leading technology events. Margarida Garcia, VP of Operations at Poolside, speaks at the trade fair, taking place in Valencia on October 23rd and 24th. TNW is a strategic partner of the event.
Update (11:00 p.m. CEST, October 3, 2024): An earlier version of this article referred to Poolside as a “Paris startup.” This was based on reports that the company had moved to Paris. Poolside has now confirmed that its headquarters will remain in San Francisco.
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