Poolside, a San Francisco-based AI coding startup, has raised $500 million in a Series B funding round led by Bain Capital Ventures. The round saw participation from major tech firms like eBay Ventures and Nvidia, as well as other institutional investors such as DST Global, StepStone Group, Schroders Capital, Premji Invest, Dorsal Capital, BAM Elevate, Adams Street, and Fin Capital. The new funding brings Poolside’s total capital raised to $626 million and boosts its valuation to $3 billion.
Existing investors Felicis Ventures and Redpoint Ventures, who led the company’s Series A and Seed rounds respectively, also participated in this latest round. Founded in April 2023 by Jason Warner, former CTO of GitHub, and Eiso Kant, founder of source{d}, Poolside aims to revolutionize software development through AI. The company has built a comprehensive full-stack solution, from foundation model to product, with a targeted go-to-market strategy for both enterprise and public sector clients.
Poolside’s foundational model, Reinforcement Learning from Code Execution Feedback (RLCEF), offers companies a private, secure, and adaptive tool that evolves with their usage and interactions.
Poolside secures major funding boost
The startup’s initial product will be an intelligent code assistant designed to enhance developers’ productivity by leveraging their advanced AI models.
The fresh capital will enable Poolside to scale operations, including bringing online 10,000 NVIDIA GPUs, one of the world’s largest training clusters. The investment will also support an aggressive go-to-market approach and allow further growth of its applied research and engineering organization. Jason Warner, CEO of Poolside, emphasized the transformative potential of AI in software development, stating, “We believe software development will be the first broad capability where AI will reach and surpass human-level intelligence.
Through our team, our applied research, and a powerful revenue engine, Poolside will bring AI for software development so that anyone in the world can build.”
Enrique Salem, a partner at Bain Capital, expressed optimism about Poolside’s potential, saying, “Advancing AI for software advances all of AI. Poolside has derived a unique approach to training via reinforcement learning that no one else has proved at scale, and their success will benefit everyone.”
Most of Poolside’s customers are Global 2000 companies and public-sector agencies, making it a prominent player in the AI-driven software development market. With this substantial funding, Poolside is poised to make significant strides in revolutionizing software development through its innovative AI technologies.
