(Bloomberg) -- Poolside, a startup building artificial intelligence software for programmers, has raised $500 million from investors ahead of the company’s plans to release an initial product.
The round was led by Bain Capital Ventures and also include funds from DST Global, StepStone Group, Citi Ventures and HSBC Ventures, Poolside said in a statement on Wednesday. The new financing gives the startup a valuation of $3 billion, Bloomberg reported last month.
“There are, roughly, over 100 million developers in the world, and our view is they are going to become increasingly AI-assisted,” co-founder Eiso Kant said in an interview. Poolside hasn’t given a timeline for a broader release of the technology, but Kant said the company is targeting enterprise customers with 5,000 engineers or more.
Investors are continuing to pile in to nascent AI startups, even as public markets have cooled on the technology’s potential for immediate payoffs.
Kant gave a demonstration of the company’s code assistant, which produced code for a “Snake” video game in seconds after being given “Write me the code for a snake video game in python” as a prompt. Poolside’s software lets developers create and test code quickly from natural-language prompts.
Poolside chose to develop its own language model rather than use existing ones in order to have control on its long-term business model going forward, Chief Executive Officer Jason Warner said. Warner, GitHub’s former chief technology officer, and Kant founded Poolside in 2023. With about 60 employees, the company is headquartered in the US, with European staff gathering once a month in Paris, Kant said.
The market for coding assistants is booming. Microsoft Corp. released a Copilot for developers, and several other venture-backed startups, including Cognition AI and France’s Mistral, are developing similar features.
--With assistance from Katie Roof.
(Updates description of software demonstration in fifth paragraph.)
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