What is Augment?
Eric Schmidt backed AI coding startup comes out running like a Ninja out of Stealth.
Hello Everyone,
In the world of Code there’s GitHub, GitLab, and? Wait for it, there’s Augment.
Gartner estimates that over half of organizations are currently piloting or have already deployed AI-driven coding assistants, and that 75% of developers will use coding assistants in some form by 2028.
As you may have noticed I’m fairly interested in this Newsletter on the topic of AI supercharging coding — and the idea that developers, real software engineers are embracing it.
Secretive AI coding assistant startup Augment raises $227M to rival GitHub’s Copilot
In a world where Devin is worth $2 Billion, what now? And I’ve got to admit Augment has been pretty secretive. Launching out of Stealth with this much funding is fairly unusual and it turns out Eric Schmidt (former Google CEO) is behind this one too.
So What is Augment>?
Augment Inc., an AI coding assistance startup, has emerged from stealth with $252 million in funding at a near-unicorn valuation of $977 million.
The company aims to empower software teams with AI, and upend the way software development is done today.
Ex-Microsoft software developer Igor Ostrovsky believes that soon, there won’t be a developer who doesn’t use AI in their workflows.
Investors
With investments from former Google CEO Eric Schmidt and VCs including Index Ventures, Sutter Hill Ventures, Lightspeed Venture Partners, Innovation Endeavors and Meritech Capital, Augment aims to shake up the still-nascent market for generative AI coding technologies.
Eric Schmidt
Index Ventures
Sutter Hill Ventures
Lightspeed Venture Partners
Innovation Endeavors
Meritech Capital
Igor recently wrote on this LinkedIn:
“In late 2021, I became fascinated by the potential of a rapidly emerging technology: generative AI (... even though it wasn't called that yet). I tried to learn about it as much as I could as quickly as I could.
As a software builder, I could see just how much generative AI will transform my field. We saw early promise in technologies like GitHub Copilot and projects like AlphaCode, but it was clear that this is barely even the beginning. I was picturing humans and AI collaborating together at building software, humans *augmented* by AI.
The idea of software developers augmented by AI is coming closer to reality day by day, even though there is still a long way to go. Today, we've raised a $227M Series B at $977M valuation for Augment, a startup working towards this vision.”
He continued:
“I am very excited about the team that came together behind this vision (including Guy Gur-Ari, Scott Dietzen, Evan Driscoll, Dion Almaer, and a dream team of Research Scientists, Engineers and "best of" team members in other roles), the investors who've chosen to back us, and most importantly, the product we are building.”
While at Microsoft, Ostrovsky worked on components of Midori, a next-generation operating system the company never released but whose concepts have made their way into other Microsoft projects over the last decade.
Series B
The company says its mission is to empower developers with powerful AI capabilities that will ultimately transform the way software is developed. Augment’s co-founders include Igor Ostrovsky, a former chief architect at Pure Storage Inc. and software engineer at Microsoft Corp., and Guy Gur-Ari, who previously worked as an AI researcher at Google.
Augment's AI platform is designed to have an expert understanding of codebases, operate at the speed of thought, support teams instead of just individuals, and carefully protect intellectual property.
Early customers, like Keeta, have reported a more than 40% increase in developer productivity across the board.
With so many AI at the intersection of coding companies during this fresh period, it’s going to be interesting to see which one gets serious momentum.
I certainly do not agree that Cognition Labs (creator of Devin) is now valued at a $2B. You might have seen the various YouTubes that debunked their demo.
I’m not sure how exactly Devin, Augment or others will do against GitHub Copilot and other more established players with huge budgets, but we’ll see.
In 2022, Ostrovsky and Guy Gur-Ari, previously an AI research scientist at Google, teamed up to create Augment’s MVP. To fill out the startup’s executive ranks, Ostrovsky and Gur-Ari brought on Scott Dietzen, ex-CEO of Pure Storage, and Dion Almaer, formerly a Google engineering director and a VP of engineering at Shopify. At least they seem to have a solid team, although details about their technology were not shared in the announcement.
Augment does plan to make money the old fashioned way however: 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. Not a big surprise there.
The company intends to reveal more when it launches its platform in general availability at some stage this year.
The company’s secrecy may have something to do with the highly competitive nature of the nascent industry it wants to disrupt.
GitHub Copilot
Cognition AI Inc. (Devin)
Magic AI
Gemini Code Assist
AWS’s CodeWhisperer
Tabnine
Codegen
TabbyML, and omg are there so many others!
We can speculate that rapid growth is perhaps the best shot Augment has at making waves in an increasingly cutthroat industry. I’m seeing still a lot of coders using Claude 3 or ChatGPT on top of all of this. That’s where ChatGPT for Enterprise might actually make sense.
So how do players survive in this lucrative but challenging arena? Eye-watering compute costs alone make the AI coding assistant business a challenging one to maintain.
It’s not going to be easy. Microsoft acquiring GitHub back in the day now looks like a really good deal. Microsoft has GitHub Copilot, which is by far the firmest entrenched with over 1.3 million paying individual and 50,000 enterprise customers as of February. While there is some debate if it is revenue generating, combined with ChatGPT it made a fairly decent combo for a while there.