Codeium has secured a $65 million Series B investment. The round was led by Kleiner Perkins and included Greenoaks and General Catalyst. The company last raised funds in 2022 with a Series A funding round worth $25 million. Greenoaks was involved in that round.
Varun Mohan, CEO, Codeium, said, “Software engineering is the backbone of innovation yet the process is expensive and inefficient due to imperfect knowledge retrieval, boilerplate tasks, maintenance overhead, and more.
“The fast rise of LLMs is now giving developers the opportunity to overcome these challenges and significantly increase their productivity. This is precisely why we developed Codeium: to let developers focus on creative, high-value tasks—not tedious maintenance work.”
Who is Codeium?
The company describes itself as “a generative AI-powered coding toolkit that leverages proprietary code-biased Large Language Models (LLMs) to reduce inefficiencies in software development and maximize developer productivity.”
It has support for over 70 languages and says it integrates with over 40 Integrated Developer Environments (IDE). Importantly, this is not just about building apps, it also includes support for Jupyter Notebooks for data scientists and analysts.
Like other developer tools, it has features such as autocomplete and context awareness. Yet it is how it uses these that is interesting. Codeium claims it “writes over 44 percent of newly committed code for its 300k+ individual user base.”
In addition the company says it is a SOC2 Type 2-compliant SaaS or self-hosted (in Virtual Private Cloud or on-premise datacenter) deployments. As part of this, it does not store customer code and never uses it for training its public system.
It is also integrated into a range of Source Code Management (SCM) systems.
Codeium says it will significantly expand its platform to support all parts of the software development life cycle. Interestingly, this will include continuous scanning and fixing of complex issues such as security vulnerabilities.
The company also intends to expand its engineering, sales and technical support functions.
Enterprise Times: What does this mean?
The demand for more software is never-ending and outstrips the number of developers. Accelerating software development is, therefore, a necessity. Like a number of other software vendors, Codeium is targeting the use of generative AI to speed up development.
One view is that developers will hit a problem and just ask the generative AI how to solve the problem. It will go away and then come back with code. The expectation is that developers will check and test the code before deploying it. The reality is rather like the abuse of sample code in the 1990’s and 2000’s. Developers will be pressured to just deploy code without checking.
Where this changes compared to other tools is that Codeium is providing continuous scanning to identify security vulnerabilities. It will be interesting to see how quickly it sees significant take-up by organisations.
