Recently, French startup Poolside has garnered significant attention. The company is dedicated to developing artificial intelligence technology with the aim of assisting in software writing. Despite their initial product not yet being released, they are already in discussions about a new round of funding, with an estimated valuation of $30 billion.
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According to insiders, Poolside is planning to raise nearly $500 million, with existing investor Bain Capital Ventures potentially leading this round of investment. This indicates that despite some disappointment from the public market regarding immediate commercial returns in the tech sector, investors remain enthusiastic about AI startups.
Founded in 2023 by former GitHub CTO Jason Warner and software entrepreneur Eiso Kant, Poolside relocated to France after a $126 million seed funding round last year. Similar to Poolside, two Paris-based startups, Mistral AI and H, have also successfully attracted significant venture capital for the development of generative AI models.
Although Poolside maintains a relatively low profile about its products and business plans, its website clearly articulates its goal: to build the "most powerful AI" for software coding and plans to extend these capabilities to other fields. Currently, Poolside primarily focuses on developers and has demonstrated a code generation product to investors. Unlike Mistral, which also offers code generation models but mainly targets enterprise clients, Poolside's approach differs in its focus on developers.
To support its AI technology, Poolside has signed multiple agreements with Australian data center company Iris Energy Ltd to obtain powerful Nvidia GPUs. This provides the necessary computational resources for the development of its products.
Key Points:
🌟 Poolside is on the verge of completing a funding round, with a valuation reaching $30 billion, despite no products being released yet.
💡 Founded by former GitHub executives, the company aims to develop the most powerful AI programming tools, primarily for developers.
🚀 The market is highly competitive, with Poolside competing against several startups, including Microsoft's Copilot and other venture capital-backed companies.