FranceAI ProgramminghardwareStartupsPoolsideis in talks with investors, people familiar with the matter said, and the company, which has yet to release a product, has seen its estimates shoot up to $3 billion.
new roundFinancingBain Capital Ventures, already an investor in Poolside, will be the lead investor in the round.
The AI industry has lost some of its fervor because of the lack of obvious commercial returns to be seen, but the fact that investors are investing massively in a startup AI company at this time suggests that they are struggling to find AI investments.
The crowded AI programming software track
Poolside was founded in early 2023 by Jason Warner, a former CTO of GitHub, and Eiso Kant, an entrepreneur. Last year Poolside got a seed investment of $126 million.
There are two other AI startups in Paris that are better known, namely Mistral AI and H, which focus on developing generative models, and both of them have received investments.
Regarding the product and business issues, Jason Warner and Eiso Kant did not provide much information. A look at the official Poolside website reveals that the company plans to develop the most powerful AI tool for software programming, and then is ready to expand the tool's capabilities to other areas.
Poolside is currently recruiting developers to try to get them to support it; the company has also shown investors a video that shows it developing a tool that automatically generates software code.Poolside has chosen a somewhat different direction than Mistral, which also offers a software code generation model, but Poolside is primarily targeting enterprise customers.
A number of AI software program tools already exist on the market that can assist programmers with programming and also automate programming. For instance, Microsoft has launched the Copilot programming assist tool, which was developed by GitHub. by way of 2018 GitHub was acquired by Microsoft. startups like Cognition AI and Mistral are also developing similar functions.
Poolside has signed a deal with Australian data center provider Iris Energy to get NVIDIA GPU arithmetic from it. Iris Energy has previously provided arithmetic resources to the bitcoin mining and AI industries.
Whether it's Poolside or OpenAI, they both develop big language models, just with different features. Although Poolside is ambitious, but so far has not found a clear business model, after all, not even a real product has been released. Many AI startups are committed to the development of basic large language models, Poolside is different, it is aimed at a niche market, only want to help developers to improve the speed of programming.
Paris becomes fertile ground for AI in Europe
Originally headquartered in the US, Poolside moved its headquarters from the US to Paris in August 2023 after raising $126 million. Just a few months before the funding, French President Macron announced that the government would provide €500 million to support AI development.
On the European continent, Paris has become the hottest AI R&D center.In June, Mistral, a French AI company that competes with OpenAI, raised €600 million (about Rs. 4.7 billion) at a valuation of €5.8 billion (Rs. 45 billion).In May, Holistic (also known as H) raised €200 million (about Rs. 1.6 billion) at a valuation of €370 million (about 3.9 billion yuan).
Like many other AI startups, Poolside's valuation has skyrocketed rapidly. in late June, Poolside raised at least $400 million at a valuation of $2 billion, and in just three months, it has now climbed to $3 billion.
Poolside will serve developers first and foremost, and in the future will help everyone develop software, no matter who they are. After that, Poolside will apply its technology to areas other than software.
Some industry insiders believe that although there are already cases to prove to us that AI can be useful in many fields, the profitability prospects of many projects are unknown, and even if they get financing, Poolside is still far from real success.