Bain Capital Ventures-led round attracts corporate, institutional and VC investors drawn to proven leadership, a unique applied research approach and a strong go-to-market focus
SAN FRANCISCO, Oct. 2, 2024 /PRNewswire-PRWeb/ — poolside, the company building the world’s most capable AI for software development, today announces the final closing of a $500 million Series B financing this summer led by Bain Capital Ventures, joined by institutional investors such as DST Global, StepStone Group, Schroders Capital, Premji Invest, Dorsal Capital, BAM Elevate, Adams Street and Fin Capital. The round closed this month with participation from a selection of enterprises, including NVIDIA, Citi Ventures, Capital One Ventures, HSBC Ventures, LG Technology Ventures and eBay Ventures. Existing investors Felicis Ventures and Redpoint Ventures, who led their Series A of $100M and $26M Seed respectively, also participated. Headquartered in the U.S., with a team distributed across both the U.S. and Europe, poolside has built a full stack solution, from foundation model to product, with a unique go-to-market approach for enterprise & public sector.
“Only a handful of companies will reach AGI – and they are being forged at this very moment,” said poolside CEO Jason Warner. “We believe software development will be the first broad capability where AI will reach and surpass human-level intelligence.”
poolside was founded in April ’23 by Jason Warner, former CTO at GitHub, where he incubated Copilot, after leading engineering at Heroku and Canonical; and Eiso Kant, founder of source{d}, the world’s first AI on Code company. They first met in 2017, where they shared the vision of bringing Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) to the world through software development.
“Only a handful of companies will reach AGI – and they are being forged at this very moment,” said poolside CEO Jason Warner. “We believe software development will be the first broad capability where AI will reach and surpass human-level intelligence. Through our team, our applied research, and a powerful revenue engine, poolside will bring AI for software development so that anyone in the world can build.”
poolside is changing software for everyone in the world, starting with developers and currently piloting with the largest enterprises in the world. Its proprietary foundation model and unique approach, Reinforcement Learning from Code Execution Feedback (RLCEF), enhances the coding capabilities of large language models. More details on poolside’s technology will be released in the coming weeks.
“There are two versions of the future. One where a rare few will benefit, and one where advancements in intelligence benefit everyone. We’re betting on the latter, and know that advancing AI for software advances all of AI,” said Enrique Salem, partner at Bain Capital Ventures. “poolside has derived a unique approach to training via reinforcement learning that no one else has proved at scale, and their success will benefit everyone.”
Today, poolside’s applied research culminates in products that are put in people’s hands, building tools that can assist developers in their day-to-day work — starting with development teams at the Global 2000 and in the public sector. These are customers with the highest standards of security and privacy, complex environments, and incredibly large code and knowledge bases. The ability to deploy in such environments has been designed since day 1 and fully embedded into poolside’s early technical and product decisions. Building a foundation model is capital-intensive and compute-heavy, and requires large investments over time. Building a powerful revenue engine that fuels the former is key to stay in the race.
“Enterprises must prioritize privacy and security,” said Matt Carbonara, Head of Enterprise Tech Investing at Citi Ventures. “With poolside, customers get the best of both worlds: not only does the data shared with the model remain private, but the model continuously learns from interactions it has with developers and improves its output.”
poolside’s first product will deliver an intelligent code assistant to developers powered by poolside’s models to accelerate what they can build and ship. As the capabilities of their models increase over time, anyone in the world will be able to build software with poolside, distributing the power of increasingly capable AI to everyone.
“Jason and Eiso were genetically engineered for this. There will only be a few companies who can achieve human-level intelligence, and these two couldn’t not build what is now poolside,” said Erica Brescia, Managing Director at Redpoint Ventures. “Their entire careers have led up to this. Eiso built the world’s first AI for software development company back in 2016 when few believed AI would ever reach today’s capabilities and I don’t think anyone thinks about the future of software or about developers more than Jason. The best of the best have followed them wherever they go, and poolside is no exception, this is already a truly world class team.”
The capital raised has allowed poolside to bring online 10,000 NVIDIA GPUs, one of the world’s largest training clusters; will support an aggressive go-to-market approach; and allow further growth of its applied research & engineering organization.
About poolside
poolside is building the world’s most capable AI for software development. Its foundational model – built from the ground up – gives companies a private and secure alternative that can be tailored to their environment and that continuously learn from their usage and interactions. Headquartered in the U.S., poolside has amassed a powerhouse team of applied researchers and engineers from Deepmind, Yandex, Amazon, Uber, and more, and a go-to-market team led by Paul St. John, previously CRO at GitHub. poolside is backed by Bain Capital Ventures, DST Global, Felicis Ventures, Redpoint Ventures, and other institutional investors as well as corporates and leading angel investors. For more information, visit www.poolside.ai.
Media Contact
Katherine Madariaga, poolside, 415-602-4395, poolside@thekeypr.com, https://poolside.ai/
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