Artificial intelligence is popular with investors. Proof of this is with the start-up Augment, founded in 2022 and ready to move up a gear. The young company has just raised $227 million in a Series B round, bringing Augment's total funding to $252 million, after the $25 million Series A led by Sutter Hill Ventures and making at the same time increasing its valuation to $977 million.
Sutter Hill Ventures, Index Ventures, Innovation Endeavors, Lightspeed Venture Partners and Meritech Capital participated in this financing. The start-up is counting on this injection of capital to accelerate the development of its products and expand its product, engineering and marketing teams. To date, it has around fifty employees and plans to double its workforce by the end of the year.
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Coding assistance powered by AI
The Palo Alto start-up is positioning itself in a growing market: development aid. With an assistant based on a large language model, the start-up wants “eliminate tedious work for developers, so teams can enjoy the joy of coding again.” The idea is not trivial given the profiles of its founders. Behind Augment are Igor Ostrovsky, former chief architect at Pure Storage and software engineer at Microsoft, and Guy Gur-Ari, AI researcher from Google. “AI has the potential to make software developers 10 times more productive, but getting there requires extensive research into AI for code coupled with advanced systems engineering,” says Guy Gur-Ari.
It is led by Scott Dietzen, who notably led Pure Storage and Yahoo!, and Dion Almaer, a former Google, Shopify, Mozilla and Palm. Augment's team of engineers also prides itself on expertise in AI and systems, particularly through the recruitment of former Databricks, Google, Meta, Microsoft, Nvidia, Pure Storage, Snowflake and VMware. On the sidelines of this fundraising, Scott Dietzen indicates that“It’s clear that we are entering a once-in-a-generation pivotal moment in software development.” And to support this transformation, millions of investors are one of the keys to development.
Software engineering is expensive
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According to Gartner, more than $1 trillion is spent on software engineering each year, but most companies remain dissatisfied with the programs they produce and consume. Software is too often fragile, complex and expensive to maintain, with development teams mired in long lists of feature requests, bug fixes, security patches, integration requests, migrations and updates. level.
Faced with this, AI is considered the silver bullet, with Gartner predicting that “by 2027, 50% of enterprise software engineers will use coding tools powered by machine learning.” And yet, current AI coding assistants are not capable of understanding the full intent of a developer. With its solution, Augment hopes to do well.
“We believe AI can help developers stay focused on the fun of coding while eliminating work that can slow progress. To achieve this vision, AI must have an expert understanding of code bases, operate at the speed of thought, supporting teams rather than individuals, and carefully protecting intellectual property”, comments Dion Almaer, vice president of product at Augment.
A market largely occupied by Google and Microsoft
Obviously, the competition promises to be tough. Google and Microsoft are already on deck, respectively with Code Assist and GitHub Copilot Enterprise. The service developed by the Mountain View firm uses Gemini 1.5 Pro, one of the new features of which is a pop-up window of one million tokens. This allows him to work on more than 30,000 lines of code at a time, and of course to be more relevant in his suggestions. It can also make changes to code on a large scale, including when distributed across multiple files.
For its part, the tool developed by the Redmond firm, particularly popular, is based on OpenAI technology and the GitHub platform. At the same time, GitHub launched an AI-based automatic code correction tool. Supposed to help companies slow the growth of this “application security debt” and support developers in their work, it is an extension of code analysis based on GitHub Copilot. The tool is available in the GitHub Advanced Security license.
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