Artificial intelligence coding startup Poolside raises $500 million from eBay, Nvidia and others

Poolside, an AI-powered software development platform, has raised half a billion dollars in new capital.

The money came in the form of a Series B led by Bain Capital Ventures, which also included participation from Big Tech companies including eBay (via eBay Ventures) and Nvidia. This brings Poolside’s total to $626 million; Bloomberg reports that the startup’s current valuation is $3 billion.

TechCrunch revealed this summer that Poolside is in the process of raising significant funding.

Poolside, based in the US and Europe, was founded last year by CEO Jason Warner and Eiso Kant, both software engineers. Warner is the former CTO of GitHub and also led the engineering organizations at Canonical and Heroku. Kant previously co-founded several developer-focused startups, including engineering analytics company Athenian.

Warner, who incubated the AI-powered Copilot tool at GitHub, met Kant in 2017. Over the next six years, the two developed a suite of AI-powered developer assistance tools that became Poolside.

Poolside develops its own AI models that help with tasks such as automatic code completion and suggesting code that may be appropriate for a particular context or code base – similar to competing AI-assisted coding tools. The company’s clients are primarily Global 2000 companies and public sector agencies; few of them have been publicly disclosed.

The Series B funding will enable Poolside to bring 10,000 Nvidia GPUs online to train future models, Warner said, which will strengthen the company’s go-to-market and research and development efforts.

Despite concerns about the security, copyright, and reliability of AI-assisted coding tools, developers have shown enthusiasm for them, and the vast majority of respondents to a recent GitHub survey said they have adopted AI tools in some form. In April, GitHub reported that Copilot had more than 1.8 million paying users and more than 50,000 business customers.

Encouraged by the adoption trend, VCs are allocating huge sums of money to start-ups dealing with artificial intelligence coding. Generative AI coding company Magic raised $320 million in August — the same day GitHub Copilot competitor Codeium closed a $150 million fundraising round. In early August, Cognition, best known for its virus coding assistant Devin, secured $175 million at a $2 billion valuation.

Polaris Market Research predicts that the AI ​​coding tools market could be worth $27 billion by 2032. At this rate it doesn’t seem too far-fetched.

LG Technology Ventures, Felicis Ventures, Redpoint Ventures, Citi Ventures, Capital One Ventures, HSBC Ventures, DST Global, StepStone Group, Schroders Capital, Premji Invest, Dorsal Capital, BAM Elevate, Adams Street and Fin Capital also invested in Poolside’s Series B.