Magic AI Inc. and Codeium, two startups using artificial intelligence to make developers more productive, have both closed nine-figure funding rounds to support their growth efforts.
Magic disclosed today that it recently raised $320 million from a group of prominent investors. Codeium, officially Exafunction Inc., announced in conjunction that it has closed a $150 million round at a $1.25 billion valuation. Both companies are using AI to automate repetitive tasks for developers, but they’re taking different approaches to doing so.
Custom models for automated programming
San Francisco-based Magic is developing foundation models optimized specifically for programming tasks. On occasion of today’s funding announcement, the company detailed a new internally developed AI dubbed LTM-2-mini. Magic says it can process prompts containing up to 100 million tokens, which corresponds to about 10 million lines of code.
The ability to ingest large amounts of code is useful for many programming automation use cases. An AI built to find software vulnerabilities, for example, must scan application files containing up to thousands of lines of code to find risky bugs. A search tool for developers may have to sift through multiple documentation repositories to find the explanation requested by a user.
Magic put its LTM-2-mini model to the test by having it complete a number of coding assignments. In one experiment, the AI developed a tool that measures the strength of user passwords. In another internal test, LTM-2-mini created a virtual calculator.
The $320 million investment that Magic announced today could help the company finance the development of additional AI models. The deal included the participation of former Google LLC Chief Executive Officer Eric Schmidt, Atlassian Corp., Jane Street and Sequoia. They were joined by several returning investors including CapitalG, Google parent Alphabet Inc.’s growth fund.
Magic detailed the funding round alongside a new technical partnership with the search giant. The collaboration will give the startup access to two AI supercomputers hosted in Google Cloud.
The first system, which the companies have named Magic-G4, will be powered by Nvidia Corp.’s H100 graphics processing units. The other supercomputer is known as Magic-G5 and will be equipped with up to tens of thousands of the chipmaker’s latest Blackwell B200 chips. The latter processor can reportedly perform inference several times faster than the H100.
Google detailed in a blog post that the two supercomputers will provide up to 160 exaflops of performance. One exaflop equals a billion billion computations per second. The world’s fastest AI supercomputer, a system called Aurora that is operated by the U.S. Energy Department, achieved 10.6 exaflops of performance in a May benchmark test.
Chatbot-equipped code editors
Codeium, the other startup that announced a funding milestone today, has also equipped its programming assistant with the ability to process large amounts of code. According to the company, the tool can ingest an application’s entire code repository. When a developer asks a question about a given program component, the AI can use its knowledge about the program’s other modules to generate a more comprehensive answer.
The company sells its software in the form of an extension for popular code editing applications. Once activated, the extension adds a chatbot to the interface of the editor in which it’s installed. Developers can ask the chatbot to explain how a given code snippet works, fix any bugs it may contain and rewrite it to improve hardware efficiency .
Codeium also provides a number of other AI features. One capability, Smart Paste, allows developers to copy a snippet of code and have it automatically translated into a new language before they paste it to a new location. Another feature called Forge can review changes to a code file for errors before the update is rolled out to production.
The company announced today that it closed a $150 million Series C round led by General Catalyst. Kleiner Perkins and Greenoaks chipped in as well. Codeium will use the capital to build new features and grow its installed base, which includes more than 700,000 active users.
Image: Unsplash
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