AI is superseding coding — and developers are embracing it.
In a recent StackOverflow poll, 44% of software engineers said they do use artificial intelligence tools as part of their development processes now and 26% plan soon. Gartner calculates that more than half of organizations are piloting or have already deployed AI-powered coding assistants, and that 75% of developers will use coding assistants in some form by 2028.
Former Microsoft software developer Igor Ostrovsky believes that soon, there will be no developer who nott are using AI in their workflows. “Software engineering remains a difficult and too often tedious and frustrating job, particularly at scale,” he told TechCrunch. “AI can improve software quality, team productivity and help restore the joy of programming.”
So Ostrovsky decided to build the AI coding platform he himself would like to use.
This platform is Increaseand on Wednesday the came up from stealth with $252 million in funding to a near-unicorn ($977 million) post-money valuation. With investment 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 disrupt the still nascent market for artificial intelligence technologies.
“Most companies are unhappy 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,” said Ostrovsky. “Augment has both the best team and the recipe to empower developers and their organizations to deliver high-quality software faster.”
Ostrovsky spent nearly seven years at Microsoft before joining Pure Storage, a startup that develops flash data storage hardware and software products, as a founding engineer. While at Microsoft, Ostrovsky worked on elements of Midori, a next-generation operating system that the company never released, but whose ideas have found their way into other Microsoft projects over the past decade.
In 2022, Ostrovsky and Guy Gur-Ari, formerly an AI researcher at Google, teamed up to create Augment’s MVP. To round out the startup’s executives, Ostrovsky and Gur-Ari brought in Scott Dietzen, former CEO of Pure Storage, and Dion Almaer, former director of engineering at Google and vice president of engineering at Shopify.
Augment remains a strangely hush-hush feature.
In our conversation, Ostrovsky wasn’t willing to say much about the user experience or even the generative AI models that drive Augment’s capabilities (whatever those are) — other than that Augment uses enhanced open models ” industry leaders’ of some kind.
He said how Augment plans to make money: 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.
“Our funding provides several years of runway to continue building what we believe is the best team in enterprise AI,” he said. “We are accelerating product development and growing Augment’s product, engineering and marketing functions as the company prepares for rapid growth.”
Rapid growth is perhaps Augment’s best shot at making waves in an increasingly bumpy industry.
Virtually every tech giant offers its own version of an AI coding assistant. Microsoft has GitHub Copilot, which is by far the most stable with over 1.3 million paying individuals and 50,000 enterprise customers as of February. Amazon has AWS’s CodeWhisperer. And Google has Gemini Code Assist, recently rebranded as Duet AI for developers.
Elsewhere, there’s a flood of coding assistant startups: Magic, Tabnine, Codegen, Refact, TabbyML, Sweep, Laredo and Knowledge (where According to reports just raised $175 million), to name a few. Harness and JetBrains, which developed the Kotlin programming language, recently was released theirs. So did Sentry (albeit with a more cyber slant).
Can they all – plus Augment now – work together in harmony? It seems unlikely. The staggering cost of computation alone makes the AI coding assistant business difficult to sustain. Overruns related to training and service models forced AI coding startup Kite to shut down in December 2022. Even Copilot loses moneyabout $20 to $80 per month per user, according to the Wall Street Journal.
Ostrovsky implies that there is already momentum behind Augment. argues that “theundreds” of software developers at “dozens” of companies, including payments startup Keeta (which is also backed by Eric Schmidt), are using Augment in early access. But will the absorption be sustained? That’s the million dollar question, indeed.
I also wonder if Augment has made any strides towards solving the technical problems that plague AI that generates code, particularly around vulnerabilities.
An analysis from GitClear, the developer of the code analysis tool of the same name, were found that coding assistants result in more incorrect code being pushed into codebases, creating headaches for software maintainers. Security researchers have warned that code generation tools can enhancement existing bugs and exploits in projects. And the Stanford researchers have were found that developers who accept code suggestions from AI assistants tend to produce less secure code.
Then you have to worry about copyright.
Augment’s models were undoubtedly trained on publicly available data, like all AI models they create — some of which may be copyrighted or under a restrictive license. Some vendors have supported it fair use doctrine it protects them from copyright claims while also providing tools to mitigate potential infringement. But that didn’t stop coders archiving class action lawsuits over what they claim are open licenses and copyright infringements.
For all this, Ostrovsky says: “Current AI coding assistants do not adequately understand developer intent, improve software quality or facilitate team productivity, and do not properly protect intellectual property. Augment’s engineering team has deep expertise in artificial intelligence and systems. We are ready to bring AI coding assistance innovations to developers and software teams.”
Augment, which is based in Palo Alto, has about 50 employees. Ostrovsky expects that number to double by the end of the year.
