poolside secured $500M for its AI platform for software development

poolside, a startup founded by former GitHub CTO Jason Warner and source{d} founder Eiso Kant, recently confirmed it had closed a $500 million Series B funding round led by existing investor Bain Capital Ventures. Bain Capital invested alongside several investors including DST Global, Dorsal Capital, BAM Elevate, Adams Street, and Fin Capital. Participants in the funding round include existing investors Felicis Ventures and Redpoint Ventures, and financial institutions and tech firms including NVIDIA, Citi Ventures, Capital One Ventures, HSBC Ventures, LG Technology Ventures, and eBay Ventures.

According to poolside CEO Jason Warner, the company was built with the belief that "software development will be the first broad capability where AI will reach and surpass human-level intelligence." To help usher in this revolution, poolside is developing what it calls Reinforcement Learning from Code Execution Feedback (RLCEF). This proprietary approach aims to enhance the coding capabilities of large language models beyond current limitations. According to the press release, more details on poolside's proprietary technology are upcoming.

The startup is already piloting its first product with development teams in some of the world's largest companies. poolside's code assistant is powered by its proprietary models, which, the company says, will become increasingly more capable, to the point that anyone will build with the assistant, regardless of their expertise. The investment enabled poolside to bring a 10,000 NVIDIA GPU training cluster online, and the startup says it will also support its aggressive go-to-market approach and allow it to build up its team, all necessary steps towards completing its lofty goal.