Generative AI coding assistance startup Codeium has raised $65 million in a Series B funding round led by Kleiner Perkins. Codeium provides a platform for composing and editing software code, including a chatbot to help design a program and handle the more tedious aspects of coding. The startup claims its AI is comparable to GitHub Copilot, the Microsoft subsidiary’s popular pair-programming assistant powered by OpenAI’s GPT-4 large language model (LLM).
Codeium Coding
Codeium’s generative AI coding assistant is aimed at maximizing developer productivity and creativity by reducing drudgery. This allows engineers to focus on higher-value, innovative challenges instead of monotonous boilerplate. Codeium claims its technology writes over 40% of newly committed code for its 300,000 individual users. The proprietary models understand software context to generate relevant code across 70+ programming languages. For enterprises, Codeium offers robust security compliance and personalization by integrating with company systems and analytics dashboards to showcase the return on investment. Codeium plans to expand the platform to assist additional stages of software development, such as system design and maintenance.
“Software engineering is the backbone of innovation yet the process is expensive and inefficient due to imperfect knowledge retrieval, boilerplate tasks, maintenance overhead, and more,” Codeium CEO Varun Mohan explained. “The fast rise of LLMs is now giving developers the opportunity to overcome these challenges and significantly increase their productivity. This is precisely why we developed Codeium: to let developers focus on creative, high-value tasks—not tedious maintenance work.”
There’s plenty of demand for generative AI-assisted coding. For instance, Hugging Face created the Starcoder tool, while Tabnine has been scaling up with the help of a $25 million round in November. But it’s GitHub Copilot and rivals tech giant rivals like IBM’s watsonx Code Assistant, Meta’s Code Llama, and Amazon’s CodeWhisperer that may provide most of the potential competition for Codeium.
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