France AI Startups Poolside.ai plans toFinancingThe round was led by Bain Capital Ventures and DSTPoolside.ai, a Paris-based startup that raised at least $400 million and valued the company at $2 billion.Generative AI Company, focused on accelerating software development.
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The company had already successfully raised $126 million in a large seed round last August, and the amount raised in this new round is expected to be close to $450 million.
Compared to other foundational model companies (such as Mistral and H), Poolside.ai focuses on solving specific problems, mainly helping developers improve productivity at this stage. The company's co-founder and CEO Jason Warner was GitHub's CTO and worked as an engineer at Heroku and Canonical. Another co-founder and CTO, Eiso Kant, founded Athenian and built a series of optimization tools for developers before being acquired by the Linux Foundation. Such a strong and experienced team has attracted investors' attention.
Although companies like Mistral and Microsoft's OpenAI are also working to provide relevant tools for developers and continue to research and adapt improvements (especially on the GitHub platform), code is still one of the more problems or blind spots faced by LLM models. Therefore, the current time is very profitable to build better solutions for the need for fast coding.
Although it is not clear whether Side has released a product and is widely used, there is evidence that it is growing steadily and has cooperated with cloud service provider IREN. In addition, compared with many other AI projects that are exploring application areas but have not yet clarified commercial potential or evidence (such as OpenAI and PwC's transaction), building collaborative assistant tools for developers is easier to realize commercial value and has a greater chance of attracting investors.
After Paris, France, quickly emerged as an important AI startup center in Europe, the new round of financing that Poolside.ai is about to complete may further consolidate the city's position among European AI startups.