Investors Include Sutter Hill Ventures, Index
Ventures, Innovation Endeavors, Lightspeed Venture Partners and
Meritech Capital
AI coding assistance startup Augment Inc. emerged from stealth
today and announced its $227 million Series B round at a $977
million post-money valuation with investments from Sutter Hill
Ventures, Index Ventures, Innovation Endeavors, Lightspeed Venture
Partners and Meritech Capital. This brings Augment’s total funding
to $252 million, following its $25 million Series A led by Sutter
Hill Ventures. The latest capital infusion will be used by Augment
to accelerate product development and build out its product,
engineering and go-to-market functions as the company gears up for
rapid growth.
The company is founded by Igor Ostrovsky, former chief architect
at Pure Storage and software engineer at Microsoft, and Guy
Gur-Ari, an AI researcher who hails from Google. It is led by
industry veterans Scott Dietzen, whose previous leadership
experience includes Pure Storage, Yahoo! and WebLogic / BEA
Systems, and Dion Almaer, an alumnus of Google, Shopify, Mozilla
and Palm. Augment’s engineering team boasts deep AI and systems
expertise, with alumni from Google, Meta, NVIDIA, Microsoft,
Databricks, Snowflake, VMware and Pure Storage.
Sutter Hill Ventures Managing Director Mike Speiser said,
“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. They have a stellar track record of delivering
best-in-class solutions and leading companies from early stage to
category leader to IPO. We are already seeing great things from
Augment, and we are just getting started.”
Over $1 trillion is spent on software engineering annually,
according to Gartner, yet most companies remain dissatisfied with
the programs they produce and consume. Software is too often
fragile, complex and expensive to maintain with development teams
bogged down with long backlogs for feature requests, bug fixes,
security patches, integration requests, migrations and upgrades. AI
is hailed as the long-awaited remedy, with Gartner predicting that
“by 2027, 50% of enterprise software engineers will use ML-powered
coding tools.” However, current AI coding assistants don’t
adequately understand the programmer’s intent, improve software
quality nor facilitate team productivity, and they don’t properly
protect intellectual property. In fact, a 2023 Gartner report on AI
and developer experience found that tools like pair programming
currently only offer “incremental, quality-of-life improvements to
developers rather than significant boosts in productivity.”
As Eric Schmidt, Founding Partner at Innovation Endeavors and
former CEO of Google explained, “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
organizations to deliver more and better software.”
“Software engineering is rapidly evolving into a collaboration
between human and artificial intelligence,” observed Igor
Ostrovsky, co-founder of Augment Inc. “At Augment, we are working
with extraordinary focus to empower teams around the world with AI,
enabling them to build better software.”
“As large language models emerged a few years ago, this team saw
their potential to make programming dramatically more productive
and yield much higher-quality software,” said Scott Dietzen, CEO of
Augment Inc. “Current AI for code platforms are falling well short
of realizing the potential of generative AI, and we are thrilled to
be launching a product to close this gap!”
CEO of Keeta, Ty Schenk, explained, “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.”
“AI has the potential to make software developers 10x more
productive, but achieving this requires deep research into AI for
code coupled with advanced systems engineering,” shared Guy
Gur-Ari, co-founder of Augment Inc. “It’s exciting to be part of a
team that is uniquely positioned to deliver on this promise, and
truly transform the way software development gets done.”
“The best software comes from augmenting developers, not
replacing them. We believe that AI technology can help developers
stay focused on the joy of coding while eliminating the toil that
can slow progress to a crawl. To achieve this vision, the AI needs
to have an expert understanding of codebases, operate at the speed
of thought, support teams instead of just individuals, and
carefully protect intellectual property,” explained Dion Almaer, VP
of product at Augment Inc. “As someone who has dedicated my career
to meeting the needs of software engineers, I am confident that
Augment is poised to deliver this new experience and revolutionize
software development at scale.”
Dietzen continued, “It’s clear we’re entering a
once-in-a-generation pivot point in software development. At
Augment, not only do I get to work with many of the brightest minds
in AI, we’re fortunate to have the backing of the world’s leading
investors to fuel our vision. Augment’s AI platform naturally and
seamlessly empowers every developer.”
To learn more about Augment and secure your spot to transform
your coding:
- Visit www.augmentcode.com
- Join the waitlist for Augment’s Early Access Program
Additional Investor Quotes
“We are strong believers in Augment's potential to not only eat
the code assistant market, but redefine how software engineering is
performed at scale!”
– Shardul Shah, Partner, Index Partners
“At Lightspeed, we believe there’s a massive market opportunity
for AI to transform software development. Augment’s exceptional
team seamlessly empowers software engineers to deliver higher
quality code far more easily, quickly and collaboratively.
Lightspeed is thrilled to be joining Augment to help make the
world's software better.”
– Ravi Mhatre, Founder and Managing Director, Lightspeed
“Augment represents Sutter Hill Ventures’ first big bet on AI.
This is an extremely talented team that marries the best in systems
and cloud programming with unique breadth and depth in AI research.
Great things are coming soon.”
– Palmer Rampell, Managing Director, Sutter Hill Ventures
“Meritech is thrilled to be backing an extraordinarily talented
Augment team. In our due diligence, we found Augment's depth and
breadth of AI talent to be greater than that of all the other
startups in the space combined.”
– Alex Clayton, General Partner, Meritech Capital
About Augment Inc.
Founded in 2022, Augment Inc. emerged from stealth in 2024 to
bring AI coding assistance innovations to developers and software
teams. The company is backed by Sutter Hill Ventures, Index
Ventures, Lightspeed Venture Partners, Innovation Endeavors and
Meritech Capital. Augment’s expert understanding of each codebase
and dependencies removes the toil in developers’ workdays, so teams
can once again experience the joy of coding.
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version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20240424911981/en/
Audrey Briers Bhava Communications for Augment Inc.
augment@bhavacom.com +1 (858) 522-0898