Codota team. Image: Codota
TabNine will continue to exist as a standalone product after the acquisition by Israeli coding start-up Codota is complete.
Israeli start-up Codota, which provides a platform for AI-assisted software development, has acquired Canadian code prediction firm TabNine.
It is hoped that the merging of the two firms will help make Codota’s existing AI platform more comprehensive and expand the number of supported programming languages.
TabNine was founded by a 22-year-old graduate of the University of Waterloo in Canada, Jacob Jackson. The program Jackson produced is what is known as a ‘coding autocompleter’. Developers install it as an add-on and are offered suggestions of how to continue each line of code in small chunks. It has been likened to Gmail’s Smart Compose feature, but for programmers.
In total, TabNine supports more than 23 programming languages across five code editors. It will reportedly continue to operate as a standalone service and its technology will be incorporated into the Codota platform.
Codota offers similar code-completion services and has developed an AI infrastructure that is meant to emulate the human understanding of code. Founded in 2015, the platform is based on research from Technicon, the Israel Institute of Technology.
‘A step towards the future’
“Using AI for authoring code already translates into enormous development teams’ throughput gains and that figure is only expected to increase as Codota’s user base expands and its product line and technology are upgraded,” said Dror Weiss, co-founder and CEO of Codota.
Eran Yahav, co-founder and chief technology officer of Codota, added: “The TabNine approach has proven highly effective and the optimum lies in combining the two and this will be our challenge moving forward.”
Khosla Ventures, a San Francisco-based venture capital firm, which was the lead investor for Codota’s last funding round in 2017, dubbed the deal “a step towards the future of software development”.
Vinod Khosla, founder of Khosla Ventures, said: “AI assistance will make it possible to build more ambitious applications faster, and Codota continues to be at the forefront of this technological revolution.”
