Investing in poolside, the Company Building the World’s Most Capable AI Code Assistant

As the market for Gen AI solutions continues to grow toward a projected $1.3 trillion by 2032, one use case is showing immediate potential: software development. Using AI assistants, software engineers can more efficiently generate and implement code — helping increase their output, improve their job satisfaction and reduce costs associated with turnover. According to Gartner, 75% of enterprise software engineers will use AI code assistants by 2028, a significant rise from less than 10% in 2023.

It’s unsurprising, therefore, that the most successful Gen AI application after ChatGPT is Microsoft’s GitHub Copilot, a developer tool estimated to have an annual revenue of about $300 million. Yet while AI assistants can help developers write code, most lack capabilities beyond code completion and cannot be tightly integrated into an enterprise’s software ecosystem and best practices.

To address this gap, a new startup is “making waves” by building a full-stack, Gen AI-based solution that helps developers write both code and complete software systems and implement them in complex enterprise environments: poolside, Citi Ventures’ newest portfolio company.

Founded in 2023 by software developers Jason Warner and Eiso Kant, poolside is building Gen AI foundation models, an API and a coding assistant designed specifically for software engineers. The company’s flagship large language model (LLM), malibu, is trained using Reinforcement Learning from Code Execution Feedback then can be fine-tuned on an enterprise’s proprietary data in order to tailor its output to the specific needs and best practices of its users. malibu and poolside’s code completion model, point, then feed into its AI pair programmer, poolside Assistant, which can write and edit code snippets, respond to user questions, give suggestions based on context from the developer’s workspace and much more.

Most importantly, poolside has been designed as an enterprise-first product, with security, compliance, privacy and risk mitigation as core design principles. Its models have been trained on data filtered to exclude copyrighted material and personally identifiable information, its entire tech stack can be deployed to an enterprise’s own infrastructure — meaning that no data or code ever leaves the company’s security boundary — and poolside Assistant offers best-in-class explainability, exposing the reasoning behind its code suggestions and letting users edit its “plans” to align its reasoning with their objectives. Given that large enterprises spend more than any other customer segment on developer tools, poolside is well-positioned to capture a substantial share of that spend in the near future — especially now that the company is bringing online 10,000 NVIDIA GPUs, one of the world’s largest LLM training clusters.

Behind this game-changing solution lies an equally cutting-edge team. Co-founder and CEO Jason Warner is the former CTO of GitHub, and co-founder and CTO Eiso Kant previously co-founded engineering observability platform source{d}, among other startups. Jason and Eiso have since brought in other software development leaders, including Chief Revenue Officer (CRO) Paul St. John, the former CRO of GitHub.

Given all of the above, we are excited to announce our investment in the company’s $500 million Series B round alongside lead investor Bain Capital Ventures, existing investors Felicis Ventures and Redpoint Ventures, and fellow new investors DST Global, StepStone Group, Schroders Capital, Premji Invest, Dorsal Capital, BAM Elevate, Adams Street, Fin Capital, NVIDIA, Capital One Ventures, HSBC Ventures, LG Technology Ventures and eBay Ventures.

Our congratulations to Jason, Eiso, and the poolside team! We look forward to helping them transform software development for enterprises around the world.