Poolside, a startup creating artificial intelligence to write software, is in talks to raise a new round of funding that would give it a $3 billion valuation even before releasing an initial product, according to people familiar with the deal.
The company is set to raise nearly $500 million in new financing, said the people, who asked not to be identified discussing private information. Bain Capital Ventures, an existing investor in Poolside, is in talks to lead the investment round.
The startup didn’t respond to requests for comment. Bain declined to comment.
The large investment in the nascent company shows the continued investor appetite for AI startups, even as the public markets have cooled on the technology’s immediate commercial payoffs.
Paris-based Poolside was formed in early 2023 by Jason Warner, the former chief technology officer of coding repository GitHub, and Eiso Kant, a software entrepreneur. The startup relocated to France last year following a $126 million seed financing round, according to reports. Two other Parisian startups, Mistral AI and H, have raised massive amounts of venture capital to create generative AI models.
Warner and Kant have said little about their product or business. The company’s website lays out a plan to build the “most capable AI” for software coding, followed by a vision to expand those capabilities into “other fields.”
The startup is currently focused on winning over developers and has shown a demo code-generation product to investors, a person familiar with the matter said. Poolside’s approach differs from that of Mistral, which offers a code-generation model but is primarily targeting corporate customers, the person said.
The market for tools that aid and automate computer coding is crowded. Microsoft Corp. has released its Copilot coding assistant developed by GitHub, which Microsoft acquired in 2018. Several other venture-backed startups, including Cognition AI and Mistral, are also developing similar features.
Poolside has signed multiple deals for access to powerful Nvidia Corp. GPUs with Iris Energy Ltd., an Australian data center company that provides computing resources for Bitcoin mining and AI.
(Updates with Bain Capital Ventures involvement in second paragraph.)