Poolside is an AI-based software development platform. It just raised half a billion new dollars.
The cash came in the form of a Series B led by Bain Capital Ventures, which also had participation from a who's who of Big Tech firms, including eBay (via eBay Ventures) and Nvidia. It brings Poolside's total raised to $626 million; Bloomberg reports that the startup's valuation now sits at $3 billion.

TechCrunch uncovered the success of the summer fundraising of the firm.

Poolside was co-founded last year by two software engineers, Jason Warner of the United States and Eiso Kant of Europe, and the former CTO of GitHub. Warner worked with engineering orgs like Canonical and Heroku. Kant had co-founded a few other dev-focused startups, including Athenian, an engineering analytics firm.

Warner, who had incubated GitHub's AI-driven Copilot tool, met Kant in 2017. Over the next six years, the duo planned an AI-driven assistive tool suite for devs that became Poolside.

Poolside creates its own AI models for many code-completion tasks -such as automatically completing code, suggesting code that might be relevant to a specific context or code base and so on-that are similar to other AI-based assistive coding tools. Most of its customers come from Global 2000 companies and public agencies, though the company hasn't publicly disclosed many of them.

Series B funding allows Poolside to bring 10,000 Nvidia GPUs online to train future models, Warner said, and will bolster the company's go-to-market and R&D efforts.
While there are significant risks to security, copyright, and reliability related to AI-powered assistive coding tools, developers have proven keen on them. The latest GitHub poll shows that most respondents admitted having accepted AI tools of some form. According to Copilot company GitHub, which reported in April, the latter has more than 1.8 million paying customers and over 50,000 business customers.

Buoyed by this adoption trend, VCs are flooding tens of millions of dollars into coding AI startups. Generative AI coding firm Magic raised $320 million back in August — the same day GitHub Copilot competitor Codeium closed its $150 million fundraising round. Early in August, Cognition, which has brought attention to its viral coding assistant Devin, secured $175 million at a $2 billion valuation.

As per Polaris Market Research, AI coding tools market may reach $27 billion by 2032. That does not seem too sci-fi if the pace of development is considered.

Some other participants in Poolside's Series B round include LG Technology Ventures, Felicis Ventures, Redpoint Ventures, Citi Ventures, Capital One Ventures, HSBC Ventures, DST Global, StepStone Group, Schroders Capital, Premji Invest, Dorsal Capital, BAM Elevate, Adams Street, and Fin Capital.