Now reportedly valued at $500m, the Menlo Park-headquartered start-up founded in 2021 says it is building ‘the future of software development’.
Codeium, a Silicon Valley start-up that combines coding with artificial intelligence, has raised $65m to bring generative AI to developers.
Led by Kleiner Perkins, a US-based VC firm that focuses on early-stage companies, the Series B funding round announced yesterday (30 January) also saw participation from Greenoaks and General Catalyst.
Codeium was founded by entrepreneurs Varun Mohan and Douglas Chen in 2021. The start-up says its intelligent code suggestion platform is used by more than 300,000 developers, who work for everything from start-ups to Fortune 500 companies.
“A bit over a year ago, we started asking ourselves how AI could have the most impact and best help developers spend their time doing valuable work,” the start-up wrote in its announcement.
“After months of research and discussions with our enterprise partners, we developed a few principles that seem simple in hindsight.”
These principles include the requirement that AI must “accelerate” every task developers may do, that it must satisfy a company’s security and legal requirements and – most importantly – must be personalised to individual developers and companies.
“We felt that there was no other offering out there that satisfied these three principles,” the Menlo Park-headquartered start-up added.
“Our team has been developing infrastructure for large-scale AI workloads for years, and this multi-year head start has allowed us to stay ahead of the curve with our vertically integrated solution.”
Codeium, which according to a Bloomberg report is now valued at $500m, estimates that its technology currently makes developers 20pc more productive.
“While impressive, we believe there is so much more that can be done,” the start-up goes on, adding that it envisions itself as not just a coding assistant, but a “productivity multiplier” that can make developers up to 20 times more productive.
“We plan to use the [Series B] capital to grow our sales and engineering teams to best support our customers, all while building the future of software development.”
Last year, Meta released a large language model called Code Llama designed to generate and discuss code from simple text prompts. Earlier this week, the tech giant released Code Llama 70B, its “largest and best-performing” AI model in the Llama family.
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