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Augment, a GitHub Copilot alternative, recently announced that it raised $227 million in a Series B funding round at a $977 million post-money valuation.
With this latest funding, Augment plans to use it to accelerate product development alongside expanding engineering, and go-to-market functions as the company gears up for rapid growth.
The round was also led by Sutter Hill Ventures, Index Ventures, Innovation Endeavors, Lightspeed Venture Partners, and Meritech Capital, among others.
Augment was founded in 2022 by Igor Ostrovsky, former chief architect at Pure Storage and software engineer at Microsoft, and Guy Gur-Ari, an AI researcher from Google.
The company is led by Scott Dietzen, who has previous leadership experience at Pure Storage, Yahoo, and WebLogic/BEA Systems, and Dion Almaer, an alumnus of Google, Shopify, Mozilla, and Palm.
So far, Augment has raised $252 million, following its $25 million Series A led by Sutter Hill Ventures.
“Augment has built a truly brilliant team, among the best in enterprise AI, and as good as any team we have ever helped put together,” said Mike Speiser, managing director at Sutter Hill Ventures.
Over $1 trillion is spent on software engineering annually, yet most companies remain dissatisfied with the programs they produce and consume. AI is seen as a remedy, with Gartner predicting that “by 2027, 50% of enterprise software engineers will use ML-powered coding tools.”
“Software remains far too expensive and painful to develop. AI is poised to transform coding, and after surveying the landscape, we came away convinced that Augment has both the best team and recipe for empowering programmers and their organisations to deliver more and better software,” explained Eric Schmidt, founding partner at Innovation Endeavors and former CEO of Google.
Augment-ing Developers
Ty Schenk, CEO of Keeta, said that Augment is solving real-world engineering challenges with their contextual awareness of our code base. “We are seeing a >40% increase in developer productivity across the board,” he said.
In a blog post, Dietzen shared his vision for Augment: ” The Next decade will see the biggest leap forward in software quality and team productivity since the advent of high-level languages.”
He believes that Augment’s AI will be capable of ever-deeper reasoning, restoring the joy of crafting software.
Almaer, VP of Product at Augment, highlighted the platform’s key features, including an expert understanding of large codebases, the ability to produce running code, and fast inference that operates at 3x the speed of competitors using state-of-the-art techniques like custom GPU kernels.
Importantly, the platform was designed from the first line of code for tenant isolation, with an architecture built to protect companies’ precious source code and intellectual property.
