Recently, CodeRabbit announced that it has completed a $16 million Series A round.Financing, whose goal is to automate the code review process through artificial intelligence. It is well known that code review is a time-consuming task for developers. According to some statistics, many companies spend two to five hours a week on it. If there is a shortage of staff, code review will become quite cumbersome and developers will not be able to focus on other important tasks.
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CodeRabbit co-founder and CEO Harjot Gill believes that the use of artificial intelligence can largely automate code review. Before founding CodeRabbit, he was a senior technical director at data center software company Nutanix, while another founder, Gur Singh, led the development team of medical payment platform Alegeus.
Gill said that CodeRabbit's platform uses "advanced AI reasoning" to "understand the intent behind the code" and provide developers with "actionable" and "human-like" feedback. He emphasized that unlike traditional static analysis tools and code checking tools, CodeRabbit is an AI-centric platform.
Although it sounds attractive, there are some doubts about AI code review in the market. Experiments have shown that AI-driven code review is often not as good as manual review. For example, Greg Foster of Graphite mentioned in a blog post that they tried to use OpenAI's GPT-4 for code review. Although the model can capture some useful information, such as small logical errors and spelling errors, it also produced a large number of false positives.
There are also some logistical disadvantages to using AI for code review. Foster points out that the traditional code review process allows engineers to improve their skills by communicating and learning from their colleagues, and relying on automated reviews may affect this knowledge sharing.
However, Gill has a different view. He firmly believes that CodeRabbit's AI-first strategy can improve code quality and significantly reduce the manual effort required for code review. Currently, Gill claims that about 600 organizations are paying for CodeRabbit's services, and they are also working on pilots with several Fortune 500 companies.
CodeRabbit’s latest round of funding was led by venture capital firm CRV, with participation from Flex Capital and Engineering Capital. The new funds will be used to expand the company’s 10-person sales and marketing team and enhance its product features, particularly in security vulnerability analysis.
Gill said they also plan to strengthen integration with platforms such as Jira and Slack, and launch AI-driven analysis and reporting tools. In addition, CodeRabbit is preparing to set up a new office in Bangalore, India, and the team size is expected to double. In the future, their products will launch more advanced AI automation features for dependency management, code refactoring, unit test generation, and document generation.