Poolside is seeking $500 million (nearly 450 million euros) in funding. This should give the French AI start-up a market value of $3 billion. Poolside focuses on creating a tool to write code using AI.
Poolside is busy raising the necessary capital through an investment round. This round is being led by private investment firm Bain Capital Ventures, Bloomberg writes. Quite remarkably, the targeted market value of $3 billion should be reached without any concrete product being brought to market.
Better LLM for code
The Paris-based AI start-up is engaged in developing an advanced foundation LLM for writing (software) code. According to the company, this LLM would be more advanced and understand complex issues better than existing LLMs. Developers could then write better code with it at a faster pace.
The LLM is trained on the proprietary code that developers add to the model. This allows for personalization and more targeted output. For this, the model learns what makes users’ projects unique. In addition to the LLM, Poolside also wants to create a GenAI assistant that users can rely on. The French AI start-up is also working on an API.
Not quite a French company
Poolside AI is not quite a truly French company, by the way. It was founded last April by Americans Jason Warner and Eiso Kant. Warner was previously CTO at Microsoft’s GitHub, and Kant was the founder of source{d}, one of the first companies in the world to adopt AI for code.
Last August, the company already received $126 million in capital in a seed round and then moved its headquarters to Paris, France. This was just after French President Macron announced a 500 million euro plan to support new “AI champions.
Other well-known Paris-based AI startups include Holistic (H) and Mistral AI. The latter, of course, is very well known as a rival to OpenAI. Poolside’s focus is mainly on developers, while Mistral AI focuses more on companies.
Also read: Mistral AI showcases its first multimodal LLM to the world