Eric Schmidt-backed Augment, a GitHub Copilot rival, launches out of stealth with $252M

AI is powering coding – and developers are embracing it.

In a recent StackOverflow survey, 44% of software engineers said they are currently using AI tools as part of their development processes and 26% plan to do so soon. Meanwhile, Gartner estimates that more than half of organizations are currently testing or have already deployed AI-based coding assistants, and that 75% of developers will use coding assistants in some form by 2028.

Igor Ostrovsky, former Microsoft software developer think that, soon, there will no longer be a developer who is not itt use AI in their workflows.

“Software engineering remains difficult work and too often tedious and frustrating, especially at scale,” he told TechCrunch. “AI can improve software quality, team productivity and help restore the joy of programming. »

So Ostrovsky decided to create the AI-based coding platform that he himself would want to use.

Today, that platform – Augment – ​​has emerged from stealth with $252 million in funding at a near-unicorn post-currency valuation ($977 million). With investments from former Google CEO Eric Schmidt and venture capital firms such as Index Ventures, Sutter Hill Ventures, Lightspeed Venture Partners, Innovation Endeavors and Meritech Capital, Augment aims to disrupt the still-nascent technology market generative AI coding.

“Most companies are unhappy with the programs they produce and consume; software is too often fragile, complex and expensive to maintain, with development teams bogged down in long delays for feature requests, bug fixes, security patches, integration requests, migrations and upgrades. level,” Ostrovsky said. “Augment has both the best team and the best recipe to enable programmers and their organizations to deliver high-quality software faster. »

Ostrovsky spent nearly seven years at Microsoft before joining Pure Storage, a startup developing flash data storage hardware and software, as a founding engineer. At Microsoft, Ostrovsky worked on components of Midori, a next-generation operating system that the company never released but whose concepts have made their way into other Microsoft projects over the past decade.

In 2022, Ostrovsky and Guy Gur-Ari, previously an AI researcher at Google, teamed up to create the Augment MVP. To round out the startup’s leadership ranks, Ostrovsky and Gur-Ari brought in Scott Dietzen, former CEO of Pure Storage, and Dion Almaer, former Google director of engineering and vice president of engineering at Shopify.

The augmentation remains a strangely secretive operation.

During our conversation, Ostrovsky wasn’t willing to say much about the user experience or even the generative AI models that drive Augment’s features (whatever they are) — except that Augment uses refined “industry leading” open models.

He explained how Augment plans to make money: standard software-as-a-service subscriptions. Pricing and other details will be revealed later this year, Ostrovsky added, closer to Augment’s planned GA release.

“Our funding gives us a multi-year runway to continue building what we believe is the best team in enterprise AI,” he said. “We are accelerating product development and expanding Augment’s product, engineering and commercialization functions as the company prepares for rapid growth.”

Rapid growth may be the best chance Augment has to make waves in an increasingly cutthroat industry.

Virtually every tech giant offers their own version of an AI coding assistant. Microsoft has GitHub Copilot, which is by far the most firmly established with more than 1.3 million paying individual customers and 50,000 enterprise customers as of February. Amazon has CodeWhisperer from AWS. And Google offers Gemini Code Assist, recently renamed Duet AI for Developers.

Elsewhere, there’s a torrent of coding assistant startups – Magic, Tabnine, Codegen, Refact, TabbyML, Scanning, Laredo and Cognition (which just raised $175 million) just to name a few. Harness And JetBrains, which developed the Kotlin programming language, recently released theirs. Sentry too (although with more of a cybersecurity bent).

Can they all – plus Increase now – do business harmoniously together? This seems unlikely. Exorbitant computational costs alone make the AI ​​coding assistant industry difficult to sustain. Overruns on training and service models forced generative AI coding startup Kite to shut down in December 2022. Even Copilot is losing money – to the tune of about $20 per month at ~$80 per month per user, according to the Wall Street Journal.

Ostrovsky hints that there is already momentum behind Augment – ​​he claims that “hDozens of software developers at dozens of companies, including payments startup Keeta (which is also backed by Eric Schmidt), are using Augment in early access. But will this adoption last? This is indeed the million dollar question.

I also wonder if Augment has taken any steps to address the technical issues affecting code-generating AI, particularly regarding vulnerabilities.

An analysis by GitClear, the developer of the code analysis tool of the same name, found that coding wizards cause more bad code to be pushed to codebases, creating headaches for software managers. Security researchers have warned that generative coding tools can amplify existing bugs and exploits in projects. And Stanford researchers found that developers who accept code recommendations from AI assistants tend to produce less secure code.

Then you have to worry about copyright.

Augment’s models were undoubtedly trained on publicly available data, as are all generative AI models, some of which may be copyrighted or under a restrictive license. Some vendors have argued that the fair use doctrine protects them from copyright claims while deploying tools to mitigate potential violations. But that hasn’t stopped coders from filing class-action lawsuits over what they claim are open licensing and intellectual property violations.

To all this, Ostrovsky says: “Current AI coding assistants do not adequately understand programmer intent, do not improve software quality or facilitate team productivity, and they do not adequately protect Intellectual property. Augment’s engineering team has deep expertise in AI and systems. We are ready to bring innovations in AI coding assistance to developers and software teams.

Augment, based in Palo Alto, currently has about 50 employees; Ostrovsky expects this figure to double by the end of the year.