AI is accelerating programming – and developers are embracing it.
In a recent StackOverflow survey, 44% of software developers said they are already using AI tools as part of their development processes, and 26% plan to do so soon. Meanwhile, Gartner estimates that over half of companies are currently testing or have deployed AI-driven coding assistants and that 75% of developers will be using coding assistants in some form by 2028.
Ex-Microsoft software developer Igor Ostrovsky believes that soon there will be no developer left notT use AI in their workflows.
“Software development remains a difficult and all too often tedious and frustrating task, especially at scale,” he told TechCrunch. “AI can improve software quality, team productivity, and help restore the joy of programming.”
So Ostrovsky decided to develop the AI-powered coding platform that he wanted to use himself.
Today, that platform – Augment – has emerged from obscurity with $252 million in funding and a near-unicorn ($977 million) post-money valuation. With investments from former Google CEO Eric Schmidt and VCs such as Index Ventures, Sutter Hill Ventures, Lightspeed Venture Partners, Innovation Endeavors and Meritech Capital, Augment aims to disrupt the fledgling market for generative AI coding technologies.
“Most companies are dissatisfied with the programs they produce and use; “Too often, software is fragile, complex and expensive to maintain, with development teams bogged down with long backlogs of feature requests, bug fixes, security patches, integration requests, migrations and upgrades,” said Ostrovsky. “Augment has both the best team and the best recipe for enabling programmers and their organizations to deliver high-quality software faster.”
Ostrovsky spent nearly seven years at Microsoft before joining Pure Storage, a startup developing flash data storage hardware and software products, as a founding engineer. While at Microsoft, Ostrovsky worked on components of Midori, a next-generation operating system that the company never released but whose concepts have found their way into other Microsoft projects over the last decade.
In 2022, Ostrovsky and Guy Gur-Ari, previously an AI researcher at Google, joined forces to form Augment’s MVP. To fill the startup’s leadership positions, Ostrovsky and Gur-Ari brought in Scott Dietzen, ex-CEO of Pure Storage, and Dion Almaer, former Google engineering director and VP of engineering at Shopify.
Augment remains a strange secret operation.
In our conversation, Ostrovsky wasn’t willing to say much about the user experience or even the generative AI models that drive Augment’s features (whatever they may be) – other than to say that Augment is some kind of fine-tuned “industry-leading” open Models used.
He said how Augment plans to make money: standard software-as-a-service subscriptions. Pricing and other details will be announced later this year, Ostrovsky added, closer to Augment’s scheduled GA release.
“Our funding provides many years of headroom to continue building what we believe is the best team in enterprise AI,” he said. “We are accelerating product development and expanding Augment’s product, engineering and go-to-market capabilities as the company prepares for rapid growth.”
Rapid growth may be Augment’s best chance to make waves in an increasingly cutthroat industry.
Virtually every tech giant offers its own version of an AI coding assistant. Microsoft has GitHub Copilot, which is by far the most entrenched with over 1.3 million paying individual and 50,000 enterprise customers as of February. Amazon has CodeWhisperer from AWS. And Google has Gemini Code Assist, recently renamed from Duet AI for Developers.
Elsewhere there is a flood of coding assistance startups – Magic, Tabnine, Codegen, Refact, TabbyML, Sweep, Laredo and Cognition (which reportedly just raised $175 million) to name a few. Dishes And JetBrains, which recently developed the Kotlin programming language Approved their own. The same goes for Sentry (albeit with a more cybersecurity-focused approach).
Can they all – plus Augment now – work together in harmony? It seems unlikely. The enormous computing costs alone make the business of AI coding assistants a challenge. Overruns related to training and delivery models forced generative AI coding startup Kite to close in December 2022. Even Copilot is losing money — in the range of about $20 per month to about $80 per month per user, according to the Wall Street Journal.
Ostrovsky suggests that there is already momentum behind Augment – he claims that “hUndreds” of software developers at “dozens” of companies, including payments startup Keeta (also backed by Eric Schmidt), are using Augment in early access. But will acceptance continue? That is indeed the million dollar question.
I also wonder if Augment has taken any steps to address the technical setbacks that code-generating AI faces, particularly related to vulnerabilities.
An analysis by GitClear, developer of the code analysis tool of the same name, found that coding wizards result in more bad code being pushed into codebases, causing headaches for software maintainers. Security researchers have warned that generative coding tools can amplify existing bugs and exploits in projects. And Stanford researchers have found that developers who accept code recommendations from AI assistants tend to produce less secure code.
Then there’s copyright to worry about.
Augment’s models were undoubtedly trained on publicly available data, like all generative AI models – some of which may be copyrighted or subject to a restrictive license. Some providers have argued that the fair use doctrine protects them from copyright claims while introducing tools to curb potential infringements. But that hasn’t stopped programmers from filing class-action lawsuits alleging open licensing and intellectual property violations.
On all of this, Ostrovsky says, “Current AI coding assistants do not adequately understand programmer intent, improve software quality, promote team productivity, or adequately protect intellectual property.” Augment’s engineering team has extensive AI and systems knowledge. We are ready to bring AI coding support innovations to developers and software teams.”
Augment is based in Palo Alto and currently employs approximately 50 people. Ostrovsky expects that number to double by the end of the year.