With backing from Bain Capital, Nvidia and Indian billionaire Aziz Premji’s Premji Invest, funding boosts Poolside valuation to $3 billion.
AI coding startup Poolside has secured $500 million in fresh funding. The Series B round was led by Bain Capital Ventures, with participation from major tech players like eBay Ventures and Nvidia.
“Only a handful of companies will reach AGI – and they are being forged at this very moment,” said Jason Warner, CEO of Poolside, in a media release. “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.”
Led by Bain Capital Ventures, the round saw participation from institutional investors including DST Global, StepStone Group, Schroders Capital, Premji Invest, Dorsal Capital, BAM Elevate, Adams Street, and Fin Capital. It also attracted contributions from prominent enterprises like NVIDIA, Citi Ventures, Capital One Ventures, HSBC Ventures, LG Technology Ventures, and eBay Ventures. Existing backers Felicis Ventures and Redpoint Ventures, who previously led Poolside’s $100 million Series A and $26 million Seed rounds respectively, also joined the latest round.
Premji Invest is the investment arm of Indian billionaire and Wipro Chairman Aziz Premji. It has offices in Menlo Park, CA, and Bangalore, India.
“At Premji Invest, we firmly believe that vertically focused AI businesses will capture meaningful economic value by unlocking new markets and delivering products to customers in novel ways,” Premji Invests said in a post published on its website. “[Poolside] fits this mold perfectly: they are reimagining software development from the ground-up. From data curation to model training to post-model deployment, poolside is utilizing first-principles to attack these pillars in a unique manner. We know poolside is on a path to solve software engineers’ most pressing problems, and we couldn’t be more excited to partner with the team on their mission to revolutionize the broader software development industry.”
Warner, a former CTO of GitHub and Eiso Kant, founder of source{d}, launched Poolside in April 2023. At GitHub, Warner helped incubate Copilot, after previously leading engineering at Heroku and Canonical. Kant’s source{d} is the world’s first AI-driven company focused on code. The two, who shared a vision of advancing Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) through software development, first crossed paths in 2017.
Headquartered in the U.S. with a team spanning the U.S. and Europe, Poolside has built a comprehensive full-stack solution, from foundation model to product, with a distinctive go-to-market strategy for both enterprise and public sector clients. It is reportedly developing the world’s most advanced AI for software development.
This latest investment brings Poolside’s total funding to $626 million and raises its valuation to $3 billion, reported Bloomberg.
Most of Poolside’s customers Global 2000 companies and public-sector agencies.
The funding has allowed Poolside “to bring online 10,000 NVIDIA GPUs, one of the world’s largest training clusters” and “will support an aggressive go-to-market approach,” the release said. It will also “allow further growth of its applied research & engineering organization.”
Enrique Salem, a partner at Bain Capital, said his fund is betting on Poolside knowing “that advancing AI for software advances all of AI.” He added, “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.”
