Continue concluded its first round of funding with $2.1M

Continue, the open-source coding autopilot, announced it has raised $2.1 million in its first funding round at the end of YCS23. The funding round was led by Jesse Robbins at Heavybit, with the participation of several angel investors, including Julien Chaumond (co-founder of Hugging Face), Lisha Li (founder of Rosebud AI), and Florian Leibert (co-founder of Mesosphere). Continue plans to use the raised funds to accomplish their mission of "making building software feel like making music."

Continue co-founders Ty and Nate were motivated by the fact that many developers are replacing Google and StackOverflow with ChatGPT, even if this alternative requires an uncomfortable amount of copying, pasting, and editing needed to provide context and insert suggestions into the codebase. In addition, proprietary LLMs are not always available, as there may be applications where using tools such as ChatGPT raises privacy concerns.

Continue originates as a solution to these problems by natively integrating LLMs with the IDE, using the developer's codebase as context, and collecting development data that can eventually be drawn upon to improve the LLM in use. Another essential feature of Continue is that it allows deep customization. In addition to being able to choose among open-source and proprietary models, developers using Continue can also write custom slash commands, context sources, templated system messages, tools, and policies. Continue has an Apache 2.0 license and plans to make money by offering a paid development data engine that works as a continuous feedback loop that updates the LLM with the most recent information and code in the team's favored style.

For a demo and the extension download, visit https://continue.dev.