AI coding assistants have gotten wildly fashionable, with the overwhelming majority of respondents in GitHub’s newest ballot saying that they’ve adopted AI instruments in some type. Y Combinator companion Jared Friedman just lately claimed {that a} quarter of YC’s W25 startup batch have 95% of their codebases generated by AI.
Sensing a possibility, VCs are speeding to again startups growing AI-powered assistive programming instruments. Certainly one of these startups, Graphite, on Tuesday introduced that it raised $52 million in a Sequence B spherical led by Accel with participation from Anthropic’s Anthology Fund with Menlo Ventures, Shopify Ventures, Figma Ventures, Andreessen Horowitz and The Normal Partnership.
Tomas Reimers, Greg Foster, and Merrill Lutsky based Graphite in 2020. Reimers is an ex-Fb software program dev, whereas Foster was an engineer at Airbnb and Google. Lutsky beforehand based Posmetrics, a buyer suggestions options agency.
Graphite started its life as a cell growth tooling firm, nevertheless it pivoted to code evaluation shortly after opening up store. Immediately, Graphite’s platform provides suggestions on code, leveraging AI — particularly Anthropic’s and OpenAI’s fashions — to flag errors and doable oversights.
“Graphite started as an internal tool we built to solve our own pain around code review,” Lutsky instructed TechCrunch. “We shared what we built with a few ex-Meta engineers, who quickly shared it more broadly, and soon the demand for Graphite became too loud to ignore.”
Graphite additionally suggests code modifications from developer feedback on codebases, summarizes code, and generates doable fixes for code failures. For the startup’s subsequent act, Graphite is spinning out Diamond, an AI software designed to catch coding bugs and errors robotically, as a standalone product.
There’s numerous competitors within the AI coding assistant house. Past GitHub Copilot and well-funded efforts like Cursor maker Anysphere, Poolside, Increase, Magic, and Codeium, startups CodeRabbit and DeepCode each focus particularly on AI-powered code evaluation purposes. OpenAI just lately up to date its macOS ChatGPT app to immediately edit code in fashionable app dev instruments, and Anthropic — one among Graphite’s monetary backers — has an assistive programming software of its personal.
Graphite has managed to carve out a distinct segment for itself, nevertheless, partly by working to allay prospects’ fears of the reliability dangers related to AI-powered assistive coding instruments. Not like some instruments in the marketplace, Graphite lets prospects outline patterns distinctive to a codebase and arrange filters for delicate data that may compromise a codebase’s safety.
“Revenue grew 20x in 2024, and we’ve scaled to serving tens of thousands of engineers at more than 500 companies, including Shopify, Snowflake, Figma, and Perplexity,” Lutsky stated. “Combined with our revenue growth, this new funding gives us many years of runway, a clear path to profitability, and the resources to invest aggressively in growth and AI.”
To make its platform much more enticing, Graphite has made its core code evaluation providing free for groups of all sizes. Beforehand, solely teams of 10 or fewer may use the corporate’s instruments at no cost.
With the newest spherical of funding, Graphite has raised round $81 million in enterprise capital thus far. The 30-person startup says that the latest tranche can be put towards product growth and rising its NYC-based group.
