It has become an inescapable conclusion that AI companies are doing everything possible to usher in the much-discussed era of agentic AI, that next stage of AI development when AI systems will perform at least some meaningful tasks autonomously. Although we still don't have an agreed-upon definition of what an AI agent is or exactly how it will differ from today's AI-powered assistants, personal and enterprise, the excitement about AI systems that can go beyond responding queries into true collaboration is tangible.

Nowhere is the excitement more tangible than in the realm of AI-assisted coding. Among many other developments:

  • In January, Mark Zuckerberg claimed he expected AI to be able to do the work of mid-level software engineers this year.
  • GitHub Copilot received an "Agent Mode" which allows the assistant to review and enhance the code it generates, as well as fix errors it finds. GitHub also previewed "Project Padawan", an autonomous agent for software development.
  • Anthropic unveiled Claude Code, a "agentic command line tool" that can be tasked with, among other things, searching and reading code, writing and running tests, and commiting and pushing code to GitHub.

In addition to this, one must also account for the several startups working on AI coding assistants independently of the large AI firms and tech companies. One such startup, Anysphere, has seen an impressive growth, in large part due to the widespread adoption of Cursor, its AI coding assistant. In November, the company has acquired Supermaven and suddenly found itself as the subject of an unsolicited bidding war, which ultimately led to the closure of a $100 million Series B led by Thrive Capital which set Anysphere's valuation at $2.6 billion.

Now, less than three months after the fact, Anysphere is in talks to secure an investment in the hundreds of millions; this time at a valuation close to $10 billion, Bloomberg reports. Moreover, Anysphere is far from the only AI coding startup wooing investors: Codeium, the developer of AI coding assistant Windsurf, has reportedly been valued at $3 billion as it plans for its latest raise. Similarly, poolside, a Paris-based AI coding startup, while not actively searching for funding, has reportedly been approached by investors.

Other noteworthy headlines this week

Anthropic has raised an additional $3.5B in a Series E round: Anthropic announced earlier this week that it has secured $3.5B in a Series E funding round led by Lightspeed Venture Partners, with new and existing investors participating. This Series E announcement follows the Claude 3.7 Sonnet and Claude Code launches.

Cohere's open research lab released Aya Vision, a "best-in-class" open-weights vision model: Cohere for AI released the Aya Vision models (8B/32B), which support 23 languages, perform remarkably well in image captioning, visual Q&A, and translations, and outperform competitors in benchmarks. Aya Vision is available via Cohere Playground, WhatsApp, Kaggle, and Hugging Face.

Scrunch AI has raised $4M in a seed round to optimize how businesses appear in AI search: Scrunch AI recently exited beta with $4M in seed funding from Mayfield to help businesses maintain visibility in AI-generated search results. Scrunch AI has seen promising adoption, having already secured 25 enterprise customers, including Lenovo and Crunchbase.

Google's new 'AI mode' adds more AI to Search and enables users to ask complex questions: Google has launched an AI mode for Search: an experimental product that leverages AI to handle complex queries typically addressed by performing multiple traditional web searches. In parallel, the company also announced it expanded access to its AI Overviews, now powered by Gemini 2.0.

Mistral AI launched a new OCR API that processes PDFs into a nicely ordered Markdown file: Mistral AI launched a document understanding API that processes PDF files using OCR to generate Markdown documents, offering superior performance for mathematical equations, scanned documents, and multilingual content while processing up to 2000 pages per minute.

CoreWeave revealed its acquisition of the AI developer platform Weights & Biases: CoreWeave is acquiring Weights & Biases to create an end-to-end platform that combines cloud infrastructure with AI development tools. The deal unites two industry leaders and aims to accelerate AI innovation while maintaining support for existing Weights & Biases customers.

HelloBetter secures over €6M to expand its AI-powered mental health solutions: HelloBetter has secured €6 million in funding to expand internationally and develop AI-powered digital mental health solutions, bringing its total funding to €31 million. The company plans to enter the French market by establishing a partnership with Mutuelles Impact, which led the funding round.