AI coding assistants have gotten wildly fashionable, with the vast majority of respondents in GitHub’s newest ballot saying that they’ve adopted AI instruments in some kind. Y Combinator companion Jared Friedman not too long ago claimed {that a} quarter of YC’s W25 startup batch have 95% of their codebases generated by AI.
Sensing a possibility, VCs are dashing to again startups growing AI-powered assistive programming instruments. One in all these startups, Graphite, on Tuesday introduced that it raised $52 million in a Collection 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 cellular growth tooling firm, but it surely pivoted to code evaluation shortly after opening up store. In the present day, Graphite’s platform offers suggestions on code, leveraging AI — particularly Anthropic’s and OpenAI’s fashions — to flag errors and potential oversights.
“Graphite began as an inside device we constructed to resolve our personal ache round code evaluation,” Lutsky instructed TechCrunch. “We shared what we constructed with a number of ex-Meta engineers, who shortly shared it extra broadly, and shortly the demand for Graphite turned too loud to disregard.”
Graphite additionally suggests code modifications from developer feedback on codebases, summarizes code, and generates potential fixes for code failures. For the startup’s subsequent act, Graphite is spinning out Diamond, an AI device designed to catch coding bugs and errors robotically, as a standalone product.
There’s plenty of competitors within the AI coding assistant area. 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 functions. OpenAI not too long ago up to date its macOS ChatGPT app to straight edit code in fashionable app dev instruments, and Anthropic — certainly one of Graphite’s monetary backers — has an assistive programming device of its personal.
Graphite has managed to carve out a distinct segment for itself, nonetheless, partly by working to allay prospects’ fears of the reliability dangers related to AI-powered assistive coding instruments. In contrast to 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.
“Income grew 20x in 2024, and we’ve scaled to serving tens of 1000’s of engineers at greater than 500 corporations, together with Shopify, Snowflake, Figma, and Perplexity,” Lutsky mentioned. “Mixed with our income development, this new funding offers us a few years of runway, a transparent path to profitability, and the assets to speculate aggressively in development and AI.”
To make its platform much more engaging, 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 most recent tranche can be put towards product growth and rising its NYC-based crew.