French AI startup Poolside.ai is planning to raise at least $400 million in this round of funding, with a valuation set at $2 billion. The leading investors in this funding round include Bain Capital Ventures and DST. Poolside.ai is a generative AI company headquartered in Paris, focusing on accelerating software development.
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In August of last year, the company successfully completed a large-scale seed round of funding, raising $126 million. This new round is expected to raise close to $450 million.
Compared to other foundational model companies (such as Mistral and H), Poolside.ai focuses on solving specific problems, primarily helping developers improve their work efficiency at this stage. The company's co-founder and CEO, Jason Warner, previously served as the CTO of GitHub and held engineering positions at Heroku and Canonical. Another co-founder and CTO, Eiso Kant, created Athenian, which provided a series of optimization tools for developers before being acquired by the Linux Foundation. This strong and experienced team has attracted investors' attention to their potential.
Although companies like Mistral and Microsoft's OpenAI are also committed to providing developers with relevant tools and continuously improving adaptability (especially for the GitHub platform), code remains one of the more problematic or blind spots for LLM models. Therefore, the current timing is highly profitable for building better solutions for rapid coding needs.
While it is unclear whether Poolside.ai has already released products and is widely used, there is evidence that the company is steadily growing and has partnered with cloud service provider IREN. Additionally, compared to many other AI projects that are still exploring without clear commercial potential or evidence (such as OpenAI's deal with PwC), building collaborative assistant tools for developers is easier to commercialize and has a greater chance of attracting investors.
With Paris rapidly emerging as a significant AI startup hub in Europe, Poolside.ai's new round of funding could further solidify its position in the European AI startup landscape.