As soon as it opened, Paris quickly became a major hub for AI startups in Europe. A new deal could make that situation even stronger.
Poolside.ai is a creative AI company based in Paris that is making tools to speed up software development. Sources tell TechCrunch that the company is raising at least $400 million and will be worth $2 billion after the money is raised.
Sources tell us that Bain Capital Ventures and DST are currently talking about how to co-lead the round. BCV has backed the company before, and DST is a new partner. It was already known that Bain would be involved, and PitchBook said that this was an expected $450 million round.
In August of last year, Poolside made a big splash (ahem) when it raised a big seed round. It was another AI company in the city to do so. Along with BCV, early stage investors such as London’s Air Street, Abstraction, and Scribble Ventures, as well as New Wave and Frst from France, gave it $126 million. There were also Bpifrance, Felicis, Point Nine, and Redpoint in the round. We tried to get investors to speak for this story, but none of them would. We asked Poolside’s CEO for a response, but he didn’t answer.
A few other companies in the city, like Mistral and H, have also raised 9-figure seed rounds, with $113 million and $220 million raised, respectively. For now, the City of Light might need a new name: the City of AI.
Overall, it seems like the market for AI startups has become very hot very quickly. Companies like Anthropic and OpenAI are raising a lot of money, and the total amount raised is in the billions of dollars. You might ask if we need another major AI business.
For a number of reasons, Poolside is getting this much money to take a big shot at the creative AI market:
The strength of the original team and how they fit with the idea behind the business. They both know a lot about development tools and DevOps. The CEO of one of the companies was the CTO of GitHub and led tech for Heroku and Canonical. The other, CTO Eiso Kant, started a company called Athenian that made tools for workers to help them work and build more efficiently. (The Linux Foundation bought that business for an unknown amount of money.) Warner was also a VC at Redpoint, so he knows how to talk to leaders and what they want from each other.
The issue being fixed. Those who are building basic LLM models take a more general approach. Poolside, on the other hand, is only looking at one use case right now: making developers work faster. An interesting article by Paul Graham from many years ago about startup ideas comes to mind when reading this. It’s about making tools that you know you would need, which means that founders and probably other technologists should need them too.
Not only does Mistral focus on developers and developer tools, but Microsoft also adapted OpenAI for GitHub (OpenAI is all about its APIs, which are also used by developers). There have been some notable examples of how code is one of the more problematic blind spots (again, at least for now) for more general LLMs. There is a window of time right now to build this and make it better than a more general method.
But that doesn’t mean Poolside isn’t also planning big things. Its website shows a three-step plan for how it wants to work with anyone who wants to write code and software, other than developers. The next step is to “generalize these capabilities beyond software to all other fields.” Not a problem!
First signs of what they’ve made. There is some evidence that the company is working and growing, but I haven’t seen proof that they have released a product to the public yet. They may be in private test right now. IREN, its server provider, said in April that Poolside had increased the amount of cloud services it got from the company.
Finally, but not least, there is making money. A person close to the company told me that there are many cases of AI being used in different parts of the market, but not many have clear signs, let alone proof, of how they can be used to make money. (Yes, OpenAI’s big deal with PwC could lead to more business with businesses, but that could take years. In the meantime, it’s still unclear what kind of take-up there would be at any company.)
If you think about the chance and size of making co-pilot tools for developers with Poolside, though, it could be one of the best and easiest places to use AI if done right. There is a clear and big need for it, and since all computer code has syntax, it’s not nearly as open-ended as many other places AI is being used. It also has limits, success indicators, and benchmarks, which makes it a great choice for investors and new businesses that want to grow.
Also Read: Microsoft Releases Copilot+ Pcs Because It Wants to Turn Windows Into an Ai Operating System
We’ll make changes to this post as we find out more.
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