Poolside Raises $500M From Bain, eBay Ventures, Nvidia & More For AI Coding Platform
AI-powered software development platform, Poolside, has raised half a billion dollars in new capital in the form of a Series B led by Bain Capital Ventures, with participation from eBay Ventures, Nvidia and more.
The new round brings Poolside’s total raised to $626 million; putting the startup’s valuation at $3 billion, according to Bloomberg.
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"Only a handful of companies will reach AGI – and they are being forged at this very moment," said poolside CEO Jason Warner. "We believe software development will be the first broad capability where AI will reach and surpass human-level intelligence. Through our team, our applied research, and a powerful revenue engine, poolside will bring AI for software development so that anyone in the world can build."
Poolside develops its own AI models to help with tasks like autocompleting code and suggesting code possibly relevant to a particular context or codebase and while they company’s customers are primarily Global 2000 companies and public-sector agencies, few have been publicly disclosed.
It’s not just about the research
To succeed in building the future, we must not only succeed at moving the technology forward, we must create a company with a powerful enough economic engine to fund the endeavor. We therefore see the world in front of us, as two races poolside is running in parallel:
- The capabilities race, which requires us building advantages in talent, compute, research and data.
- The go-to-market race, which requires building advantages in talent, product and distribution.
The capital raise we’ve announced today supports us in both.
This investment has obvious benefits for eBay, whose own AI efforts have been hit or miss and stands out as a more tech focused endeavor than past funding since eBay Ventures was founded in early 2022.
Their first investment was Norwegian second-hand marketplace Tise in July 2022.
Liz Morton
Followed by investments in UK-based luxury resale outlet Cudoni and digital fan experience platform Notable Live both in January 2023.
Liz Morton
Sadly, the Cudoni investment did not pay off - just 3 months after raising £7.5 million ($9 million) in funding, the company announced it was going out of business effective immediately in April 2023.
Liz Morton
eBay Ventures joined Dick's Sporting Goods in investing in pre-owned sporting goods and equipment marketplace SidelineSwap in May 2023.
Liz Morton
Australian luxury fashion rental app The Volte received funding from eBay Ventures in May 2023 as well.
Liz Morton
And in October 2023, eBay pushed further into payments, backing UK Buy Now, Pay Later company Zilch.
Liz Morton
On the tech side, eBay Ventures has also partnered with TechStars on the Future of Ecommerce pre-seed accelerator program for early stage startups which announced its inaugural cohort of founders in October 2023.
Liz Morton
Poolside's first product will deliver an intelligent code assistant to developers powered by poolside's models to accelerate what they can build and ship. As the capabilities of their models increase over time, anyone in the world will be able to build software with poolside, distributing the power of increasingly capable AI to everyone.
The capital raised has allowed Poolside to bring online 10,000 NVIDIA GPUs, one of the world's largest training clusters; will support an aggressive go-to-market approach; and allow further growth of its applied research & engineering organization.
