A brand new startup desires to assist builders create personalized, contextual coding assistants that may join with any mannequin and combine seamlessly with their growth environments.
Based in June 2023 by CEO Ty Dunn and CTO Nate Sesti (pictured above), Y Combinator alum Proceed has already garnered some 23,000 stars on GitHub and 11,000 Discord neighborhood members over the previous couple of years. To construct on this momentum, Proceed is asserting model 1.0 of its product, supported by a recent $3 million in seed funding.
Coding assistant explosion
Proceed’s launch comes amid an explosion in AI coding assistants like GitHub Copilot and Google’s Gemini Code Help, to not point out youthful upstarts similar to Codeium and Cursor, which have raised bucketloads of money from buyers.
Proceed, for its half, pitches itself as “the leading open-source AI code assistant” that may join with any mannequin and lets groups add their very own context by pulling in information from platforms like Jira or Confluence.
With their fashions and context related, builders can create customized autocomplete and chat experiences straight inside their coding setting. Autocomplete, as an illustration, offers in-line code strategies as they kind, whereas chat permits customers to ask questions on a particular piece of code. The edit operate additionally allows customers to switch code by describing what adjustments they need to make.
The product aspect of as we speak’s announcement consists of the primary “major” launch of Proceed’s open supply extensions for VS Code and JetBrains.
“This signals to enterprises that this is a stable project you can bet on and build on,” Dunn advised TechCrunch in an interview.
Individually, Proceed can be launching a brand new hub, which could be likened to one thing like Docker Hub, GitHub, or Hugging Face — a spot for builders to create and share customized AI code assistants, replete with a registry for outlining and managing the assorted constructing blocks they’re made out of.
At launch, the hub consists of pre-built AI coding assistants, in addition to “blocks” from verified companions Mistral and its Codestral mannequin, Claude 3.5 Sonnet from Anthropic, and DeepSeek-R1 from Ollama. Nevertheless, any particular person vendor or developer can contribute blocks and assistants to the hub.
A block right here might imply fashions, which allow you to specify which AI mannequin to make use of and the place; guidelines for customizing the AI assistant; context to outline the exterior context supplier (e.g. Jira or Confluence); prompts to pack prewritten mannequin prompts for invoking complicated directions; docs to outline documentation websites (e.g. Angular or React); information, which permit builders to ship growth information to a predefined vacation spot for analytical functions; or MCP servers, which outline a normal manner of constructing and sharing instruments for language fashions.
“Culture of contribution”
The thought behind this new hub is that almost all of customers received’t require deep customizations — they’ll solely have to make minor tweaks to coding assistants or blocks that exist already within the hub.
This raises the query: What’s the incentive for creating customizations and sharing them with the world? Because it seems, it’s precisely what drives open supply communities elsewhere. Lots of the launch companions are the very firms that create the underlying instruments or fashions (e.g. Mistral and Anthropic), making Proceed’s new hub a perfect place to curry favor with builders.
Furthermore, the “open source ethos” is on the coronary heart of what Proceed is striving for. So if somebody has created any customizations to be used at work, then why not simply share it with the broader neighborhood? Finally, Proceed is positioning itself because the antithesis of proprietary “black box” AI assistant suppliers.
“This is a hub for the entire ecosystem to come together and work together,” Dunn mentioned. “Instead of everybody building their own closed-source AI code Assistant, what if we had an open architecture where all of us can work together to create the building blocks people need to build tailored experiences for themselves?”
That is what Dunn refers to as establishing a “culture of contribution,” whereby builders are inspired to experiment and create their very own customizations whereas producing worth for everybody.
“With Continue 1.0, we are enabling this culture of contribution for developers to create and share custom AI code assistants,” Dunn mentioned. “This registry will be a place of discovery within and across organizations, which will grow in lock-step with the evolution of blocks and open, AI-enhanced developer tools.”
Then there may be the info management facet. In a extra generic “one-size-fits-all” platform, the seller can extract vital worth from observing how builders function at scale, and feed this decision-making information again into the platform to enhance issues for everybody. This kind of exercise has created controversy for the likes of GitHub Copilot, which has been accused of hijacking the arduous work of tens of millions of open supply software program builders for its personal positive aspects.
With Proceed, the thought is that firms have extra management over what occurs with their information — they will share as a lot or as little as they like.
“When you use Continue, you get to keep your data,” Dunn mentioned. “As an organization, you can pool all of your data for all of your developers in one place. That is not possible in the one-size-fits-all, black box code assistant, where their SaaS offerings and strategy is to take your data and use it to improve it for everyone.”
A mannequin enterprise
It’s nonetheless comparatively early days for Proceed, however the startup says it has labored with a handful of well-known companies by means of the event part — Ionos, (additionally an early Proceed buyer), in addition to Siemens and Morningstar.
Whereas massive companies are very a lot in its focus, Dunn says that Proceed is concentrating on builders of all sizes and shapes, from freelancers and small groups by means of the gamut of enterprises. This factors to how Proceed will earn a living — its new hub ships with a free solo tier, however organizations that want larger management over their information pays to entry extra administration, governance, and safety tooling.
“There’s a lot of interest from larger organizations, but we’ve also seen everything down to the individual developer who just wants some kind of customization for themselves. In those cases, I think the solo tier will be more than sufficient,” Dunn mentioned. “But as that freelancer or small team starts to grow, and they need some amount of governance, then they can become customers.”
The free solo tier ships with three “visibility” ranges. A developer’s contributions could be stored personal, shared internally as a part of a crew, or made completely public. Certainly, the solo tier can technically be utilized in a crew setup; it simply lacks a number of the options {that a} crew would usually require. A separate “teams” tier provides extra “multi-player” smarts to the combo, with admin controls for governing all of the blocks and assistants — who has entry to what.
The enterprise tier, in the meantime, ramps the info, safety, and governance choices up a notch with extra granular controls over what blocks, fashions, variations, and distributors are used.
“The admin can also manage the security around credentials, where the data goes, and receive an audit log for the who, what, when and where of developer usage,” Dunn mentioned.
Proceed had beforehand raised $2.1 million after graduating from Y Combinator in late 2023, and it has now raised an additional $3 million in SAFEs (funding with delayed fairness allocation) led by developer-focused VC agency, Heavybit.
Dunn says the majority of the recent money will go towards software program engineering salaries, and it plans to “at least double” its present headcount of 5.
“We’re using open source as a distribution approach, and so as a result, we keep our costs very low — we don’t need to capitalize nearly as much as other competitors,” Dunn mentioned.
