Highlights:
- The platform is presented as an extension that software teams can install within their Integrated Development Environments (IDEs).
- According to the company, a developer can describe a task in natural language, and the software automatically generates the code.
Recently, Codeium Inc., a startup leveraging large language models for a developer productivity platform, revealed securing a USD 65 million Series B funding round.
The investment was led by Kleiner Perkins, with involvement from General Catalyst and returning backer Greenoaks. Bloomberg reports that the raise values Codeium worth at USD 500 million. The business will use the money to expand its sales force and add new functionalities to its platform for developer productivity.
Chief Executive of Codeium, Varun Mohan, 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.”
Software teams can install the platform as an extension in their integrated development environments (IDEs). An integrated development environment (IDE) is a word processor designed for writing code, not fiction. These programs typically come with a number of additional features, most notably bug-fixing and bug-finding tools.
Codeium integrates an AI chatbot into the user’s integrated development environment after installation. It looks like a new sidebar on the left side of the UI. When working on an application, developers can ask artificial intelligence questions about details like the interactions between two unfamiliar code components.
Codeium claims additional time-saving measures for its chatbot. The company claims that a developer can input a task’s natural language description, and the software will automatically generate the code required to complete the task. It can translate between more than 70 programming languages and generate code in each one.
The platform offered by the company provides an autocomplete tool in addition to the embedded chatbot. It links to the area of an IDE’s user interface where programmers write code and make additional suggestions right from the panel. The tool can generate up to multiple lines of code at once.
Codeium claims competing products find it difficult to provide helpful autocomplete recommendations when asked to add a line of code between two already-existing snippets. According to the company, its platform offers the only autocomplete tool without this restriction available on the market. Developers can use it for a wider variety of programming tasks.
Under the hood, OpenAI’s GPT-4 and several in-house large language models power the platform. According to the company, its models can produce both text and code. This enables them to produce documentation that explains the operation of recently written code.
With the recently announced USD 65 million round, Codeium intends to expand the AI capabilities of its platform into new domains. Fixing bugs and cybersecurity vulnerabilities will be easier with the help of one feature presently under development. It also aims to present an AI tool for updating outdated code in applications.
The company offers its platform in a free edition and two paid versions with extra features, mainly administrative controls tailored for enterprises. Since its launch in late 2022, the company has amassed a user base of over 300,000 developers. Codeium also states that numerous Fortune 500 companies utilize its software.