Poolside, a San Francisco-based startup, has raised $500 million in a Series B financing round to develop the world’s most capable AI for software development. The round was led by Bain Capital Ventures and included participation from notable investors such as NVIDIA, eBay Ventures, and DST Global. Founded in April 2023 by Jason Warner, former CTO at GitHub, and Eiso Kant, founder of source{d}, Poolside aims to bring Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) to the world through software development.
The company believes that software development will be the first broad capability where AI will reach and surpass human-level intelligence. Poolside CEO Jason Warner said, “Only a handful of companies will reach AGI – and they are being forged at this very moment. We believe software development will be the first broad capability where AI will reach and surpass human-level intelligence.”
The company is currently piloting its technology with some of the largest enterprises in the world.
Poolside’s proprietary foundation model and unique approach, Reinforcement Learning from Code Execution Feedback (RLCEF), enhance the coding capabilities of large language models.
Poolside raises $500M for AI development
Enrique Salem, partner at Bain Capital Ventures, said, “There are two versions of the future.
One where a rare few will benefit, and one where advancements in intelligence benefit everyone. We’re on the latter, and know that advancing AI for software advances all of AI.”
Poolside’s first product will deliver an intelligent code assistant to developers, powered by the company’s models to accelerate what they can build and ship. Over time, as the capabilities of their models increase, anyone in the world will be able to build software with Poolside.
The capital raised has enabled Poolside to bring online 10,000 NVIDIA GPUs, one of the world’s largest training clusters, which will support an aggressive go-to-market approach and further growth of its applied research and engineering organization. Poolside has 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.
The company is backed by Bain Capital Ventures, DST Global, Felicis Ventures, Redpoint Ventures, and other institutional investors as well as leading angel investors.
