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the global competition in ai is still going on. in china, the most popular ai unicorns are dark side of the moon with a valuation of rmb 21.2 billion, minimax with a valuation of over rmb 17.7 billion, and zhipu ai with a valuation of over rmb 10 billion. however, the most eye-catching company overseas is none other than openai in the united states. the latest news is that openai is raising us$6.5 billion at a huge valuation of us$150 billion (rmb 1,063.5 billion). this figure is breathtaking.

recently, another ai unicorn that is highly sought after by capital has emerged, unveiling the battleground of the "ai competition" in europe.

this company is called poolside. it is as young as the above ai stars. it was founded in early 2023 and is headquartered in paris, france. similarly, its valuation has also grown rapidly in the short term. the latest news is that it is currently negotiating a new round of us$500 million in financing, with a valuation of nearly us$3 billion (rmb 21.27 billion). bain capital is negotiating to lead this round of investment.

just over two months ago in june, poolside announced a new round of financing with a valuation of $2 billion, which increased by another $1 billion in just two months. moreover, such a high valuation occurred before there was any product, which is quite rare. although the current capital has gradually become more rational about the ai ​​craze, poolside has still attracted enough interest from capital.

github's former cto starts a new business, sees openai as his only competitor

poolside belongs to the field of ai programming, and the demand in this market is quite hot right now.

taking the leading company github copilot as an example, its paying users exceeded 1.8 million in april this year, and its arr was nearly 200 million us dollars, a 40% increase from the previous quarter. the growth is quite rapid, making it the most widely adopted ai development tool in history and another milestone in the field of ai.

it is not surprising that github copilot can achieve this result. it is backed by a giant, and is an artificial intelligence coding assistant jointly developed by github, microsoft and openai. the future is the world of ai, and developers are one of the most important fields of ai, so the importance of this track is self-evident.

in addition to github copilot, there are at least three startups in the ai ​​programming field that have achieved unicorn valuations. poolside is one of them.

as luck would have it, poolside founder jason warner has a deep connection with github. he was the former cto of github and rebuilt github at many levels, a process that ultimately led to its acquisition by microsoft for $7.5 billion in 2018.

it can be said that jason warner is the hero behind github and the founder of the current github copilot. therefore, he has attracted much attention in the technology industry. but looking back at jason warner's growth process, he can be said to be a successful example of a general developer gradually growing into a technology master.

jason warner graduated from pennsylvania state university with a bachelor's degree in computer science, and then obtained a master's degree in computer science from rensselaer university. after graduation, he began his career at ibm and worked for microcast, sbs, our vacation store, the 41st parameter and other companies. in june 2017, he joined github.

in short, he is a veteran with a 30-year career, but the difference is that he has been full of innovations and breakthroughs in this process, bringing far-reaching impacts and contributions to the entire industry.

in 2021, jason warner left github, which was equivalent to planning to "retire". so at first he did not plan to start a business, but planned to be a full-time investor like many successful technology giants. at that time, he joined an american venture capital company called redpoint ventures as an md with a grand vision.

redpoint ventures is no stranger to us. it is a well-known venture capital firm in silicon valley. it was founded in 1999 and has invested in hundreds of technology companies around the world. it set up an office in china in 2005 and has invested in qihoo 360, pony.ai, 360 digital technology, enflame technology, baichuan intelligence, etc.

but like many tech gurus who are not content with being lonely after retirement and come back to the stage again, jason warner started another business soon after. it all started when he and serial entrepreneur eiso kant came up with a new idea while making a programming-related podcast. they hoped to create an ai company trained on code, software, and git repositories. so in 2023, they founded poolside. jason warner also made a harsh statement: "the only competitor we can think of is openai."

this ambition was actually revealed in an interview with redpoint ventures. when jason warner was asked, "if you weren't a vc, what would you do?" he answered, "i would like to be the ceo/cto/cpo of a company that changes the world."

sure enough, jason warner's inner vision once again led him on a "great journey".

ai programming fever reaches new heights

what poolside is trying to do is indeed very cutting-edge. as jason warner said, "it feels like we are breaking new ground."

in fact, poolside has not yet released a product. in my opinion, its philosophy is different in two ways:

it believes that large language models like the one behind chatgpt have demonstrated early capabilities in assisting developers, generating code and documentation, but are still in their infancy and only provide engineers with additional productivity, and have not yet truly led to major changes.

second, unlike other ai programming companies that aim to replace human software engineers, poolside emphasizes the combination of ai and humans, simply transforming the current state of human-led + ai-assisted to ai-led + human-assisted.

in terms of products, poolside will build powerful next-generation basic models and infrastructure for developers in the ai ​​era, and will pursue narrow artificial intelligence through software and code. companies like github copilot will become its customers. but what exactly it will be like may only be known after the product comes out. it is reported that poolside is currently in negotiations with a large technology company to obtain a trillion-level parameter model.

this grand vision would be less convincing if it were given to someone else. but given jason warner's previous experience, many people are willing to buy into the vision he described. so poolside received $126 million in seed round funding after its founding, and the lead investor was his vc partner redpoint ventures. then came the rumored $3 billion valuation financing, with bain capital already in the game.

the financing competition in the field of ai programming is in full swing in 2024. in addition to poolside, in recent times, many ai programming products have completed a new round of huge financing.

one is cognition, which was founded by a chinese team less than a year ago. its product is devin, which has the reputation of "the world's first and most powerful ai software engineer". unlike ai programming assistants such as github copilot, devin is not a simple auxiliary role, but can complete the entire development project completely independently and end-to-end, including the complete programming life cycle from writing code, fixing bugs to final execution. currently, the founding team of cognition has a total of 10 people, most of whom are chinese.

with the launch of devin, in march this year, cognition labs announced the completion of a us$21 million series a financing round led by funders fund, with participation from stripe founders patrick collison and john collison, former twitter executive elad gil and others. the company was valued at us$350 million at the time.

just one month later, cognition announced that it had completed a new round of financing of us$175 million, still led by founders fund. its valuation increased 5.7 times to us$2 billion, making it a unicorn. at that time, cognition had only been established for 6 months.

almost at the same time, another unicorn startup augment also announced that it had received $252 million in financing, with a post-investment valuation of nearly $1 billion, joining the ranks of unicorns. this company is very low-key, with a strong startup team of less than ten people, and a very luxurious investment team behind it, including not only well-known american vcs such as sutter hill ventures, index ventures, innovation endeavors, lightspeed venture partners and meritech capital, but also individual investors including former google ceo eric schmidt.

in china, large manufacturers and technology companies are also intensively launching new products, following the mainstream approach of "using ai as an auxiliary".for example, baidu released comate2.0 code assistant in march this year; in early april, alibaba’s first ai employee took up his post and fully promoted ai programming internally; in late april, sensetime launched a large code model all-in-one machine; in june, bytedance released marscode; in july, zhipu ai released codegeex, a powerful intelligent programming assistant...

at present, the field of ai programming is developing rapidly both at home and abroad. not only have product strength and concepts undergone unprecedented iterations, but the enthusiasm of capital has also reached new heights.