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.