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Now reportedly valued at $500m, the California-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 Mountain View-based start-up added.
“Our team has been developing infrastructure for large-scale AI workloads for years, and this multiyear 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 said, 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 which is 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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