AI is supercharging coding — and developers are embracing it.
In a recent StackOverflow poll, 44% of software engineers said that they Use AI tools as part of their development process. Now and 26% plan to achieve this soon. Gartner Estimation that greater than half of organizations are currently piloting or have already deployed AI-powered coding assistants, and that 75% of developers will use some form of coding assistant by 2028.
Former Microsoft software developer Igor Ostrovsky Pretty sure soon there won’t be a developer who not Use AI of their workflows. “Software engineering is a difficult and very tedious and frustrating task, especially at scale,” he told TechCrunch. “AI can improve software quality, team productivity and help restore the joy of programming.”
So Ostrovsky decided to construct an AI-powered coding platform that he himself would love to make use of.
That is the platform. increase, and on Wednesday it stealthily emerged with $252 million in funding at a near-unicorn ($977 million) post-money valuation. With investment from former Google CEO Eric Schmidt and VCs including Index Ventures, Sutter Hill Ventures, Lightspeed Venture Partners, Innovation Endeavors and Meritech Capital, Augment goals to shake up the still-nascent marketplace for generative AI coding technologies.
“Most companies are dissatisfied with the programs they develop and use. Software is often fragile, complex and expensive to maintain with development teams dealing with feature requests, bug fixes, security,” Ostrovsky said. stuck with long backlogs for patches, integration requests, migrations and upgrades “Augment has each the very best team and recipe to empower programmers and their organizations to deliver high-quality software faster can provide.”
Ostrovsky spent nearly seven years at Microsoft before joining Pure Storage, a startup developing flash data storage hardware and software products, as a founding engineer. While at Microsoft, Ostrovsky worked on components of Midori, a next-generation operating system that the corporate never released but whose concepts have made their way into other Microsoft projects over the past decade.
In 2022, Ostrovsky and Guy Gur-Ari, formerly an AI research scientist at Google, teamed as much as create Augment’s MVP. To fill out the startup’s executive ranks, Ostrovsky and Gur-Ari brought in former Pure Storage CEO Scott Dietzen and Dion Almaer, formerly director of engineering at Google and VP of engineering at Shopify.
Augment is a strangely silent operation.
In our conversation, Ostrovsky wasn’t willing to say much in regards to the user experience and even the creative AI models driving Augment’s features (whatever they’re) — let alone that Augment is a few kind of fine-tuned “industry.” is using the well-known” open model. .
That’s how Augment plans to make cash: standard software-as-a-service subscriptions. Pricing and other details will likely be revealed later this yr, Ostrovsky added, closer to Augment’s planned GA release.
“Our funding provides a multi-year runway to continue building what we believe to be the best team in enterprise AI,” he said. “We are accelerating product development and building out Augment’s product, engineering and go-to-market functions as the company prepares for rapid growth.”
Rapid growth might be Augment’s best shot at making waves in an increasingly cut-throat industry.
Virtually every tech giant offers its own version of an AI coding assistant. Microsoft has GitHub Copilot, its strongest ever with greater than 1.3 million paying individual and 50,000 enterprise users as of February. Amazon has AWS’ CodeWhisperer. And Google has Gemini Code Assist, recently rebranded as Duet AI for developers.
Elsewhere, there’s a torrent of coding assistant startups: Magic, Tabnain, Codegen, Refact, TabbyML, Swap, Laredo and Perception (which Allegedly raised only $175 million). To name a few Usage And JetBrains, which recently developed the Kotlin programming language. Continued their very own. Santri did the identical (albeit with a more cybersecurity bent).
Can all of them – plus Augment now – do business together? That doesn’t seem likely. Eye-watering compute costs alone make it difficult to sustain an AI coding assistant business. Overruns related to training and serving models forced generative AI coding startup Kite to shut down in December 2022. Even Copilot loses moneyAccording to the Wall Street Journal, per user is about $20 to $80 per thirty days.
Ostrovsky implies that Augment already has momentum behind it; He claims that “hSoftware developers at “dozens” of corporations, including payments startup Keeta (also backed by Eric Schmidt), are using Augment in early access. But will the uptake be sustained? This is actually the million dollar query.
I also wonder if Augment has made any strides towards addressing the technical pitfalls the code-generating AI faces, particularly around vulnerabilities.
An evaluation by GitClear, developer of the code analytics tool of the identical name, found that coding assistants lead to more incorrect code being pushed to the codebase, causing headaches for software maintainers. Security researchers warn that generative coding tools can increase Current bugs and exploits in projects. And Stanford researchers have. found That developers who accept code recommendations from AI assistants produce less secure code.
Then there’s copyright to fret about.
Augment’s models were of course trained on publicly available data, like all creative AI models – some of which could also be under copyright or restrictive licenses. Some vendors have argued. Doctrine of fair use Protects them from copyright claims while also developing tools to mitigate potential infringement. But that hasn’t stopped coders. Filing Class motion lawsuits alleging open licensing and IP violations.
For all that, Ostrovsky says: “Current AI coding aids don’t adequately understand programmer intent, improve software quality, or facilitate team productivity, and they don’t do the right thing.” Augment’s engineering team prides itself on deep AI and systems expertise, able to bring AI coding support to developers and software teams.
Augment, based in Palo Alto, has about 50 employees. Ostrowski expects that number to double by the tip of the yr.
Credit : techcrunch.com
