French AI startup Poolside.ai plans to conduct a new round of financing, aiming to raise at least US$400 million and have a valuation of US$2 billion. Lead investors include Bain Capital Ventures and DST. The Paris-based company focuses on using generative AI to accelerate software development, and its strong team background and clear business model have attracted significant investment. Previously, Poolside.ai has completed a US$126 million seed round of financing, and this financing will further promote its development.
French AI startup Poolside.ai plans to raise at least US$400 million in this round of financing and set its valuation at US$2 billion. The financing was led by Bain Capital Ventures and DSTPoolside.ai is a Paris-based generative AI company focused on accelerating software development.
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In August last year, the company had successfully raised $126 million in a massive seed round. This new round of fundraising is expected to be close to US$450 million.
Compared with other basic model companies (such as Mistral and H), Poolside.ai focuses on solving specific problems and at this stage mainly helps developers improve work efficiency. The company's co-founder and CEO, Jason Warner, is the former chief technology officer of GitHub and has held engineering positions at Heroku and Canonical. Another co-founder and chief technology officer, Eiso Kant, previously founded Athenian and built a series of optimization tools for developers before being acquired by the Linux Foundation. Such a strong and experienced team has attracted investors' attention to its capabilities.
Although companies like Mistral and Microsoft's OpenAI are also committed to providing developers with relevant tools and continuing to conduct research on adaptive improvements (especially for the GitHub platform), code is still one of the many problems or blind spots faced by the LLM model. So the current time is very profitable to build better solutions for fast coding needs.
While it's unclear whether side has released a product and is widely used, there is evidence of steady growth and a partnership with cloud service provider IREN. In addition, compared with many AI projects that are being explored in other application areas but have no clear commercialization potential or evidence (such as the OpenAI and PwC transactions), it is easier to realize commercialization value by building collaborative assistant tools for developers. And there are greater opportunities to attract investors.
After Paris, France has rapidly emerged as an important AI start-up center in Europe, the new round of financing that Poolside.ai will complete this time may further consolidate the city's position among European AI start-ups.
The successful financing of Poolside.ai not only reflects its technical strength and business potential, but also reflects the huge market demand for AI-assisted software development tools. This huge financing will effectively promote its development and consolidate France’s position in the European AI field.