AI coding assistance startup Augment has emerged from stealth and announced a $227 million Series B funding round at a $977 million post-money valuation with investments from Sutter Hill Ventures, Index Ventures, Innovation Endeavors, Lightspeed Venture Partners, and Meritech Capital. Including this round of funding, Augment has raised a total of $252 million, including the $25 million Series A funding round led by Sutter Hill Ventures.
Augment will use this latest funding round to accelerate product development and expand its product, engineering, and go-to-market functions as the company gears up for rapid growth.
The company was founded by Igor Ostrovsky, former chief architect at Pure Storage and software engineer at Microsoft, and Guy Gur-Ari, an AI researcher who worked at Google. The company is led by industry veterans Scott Dietzen, whose previous experience includes Pure Storage, Yahoo! and WebLogic / BEA Systems, and Dion Almaer, an alumnus of Google, Shopify, Mozilla, and Palm. Augment’s engineering team has experience in deep AI and systems expertise, with alumni from Google, Meta, NVIDIA, Microsoft, Databricks, Snowflake, VMware, and Pure Storage.
KEY QUOTES:
“Augment has built a truly brilliant team, among the best in enterprise AI, and as good as any team we have ever helped put together. They have a stellar track record of delivering best-in-class solutions and leading companies from early stage to category leader to IPO. We are already seeing great things from Augment, and we are just getting started.”
– Sutter Hill Ventures Managing Director Mike Speiser
“Software remains far too expensive and painful to develop. AI is poised to transform coding, and after surveying the landscape, we came away convinced that Augment has both the best team and recipe for empowering programmers and their organizations to deliver more and better software.”
– Eric Schmidt, Founding Partner at Innovation Endeavors and former CEO of Google
“Software engineering is rapidly evolving into a collaboration between human and artificial intelligence. At Augment, we are working with extraordinary focus to empower teams around the world with AI, enabling them to build better software.”
– Igor Ostrovsky, co-founder of Augment
“As large language models emerged a few years ago, this team saw their potential to make programming dramatically more productive and yield much higher-quality software. Current AI for code platforms are falling well short of realizing the potential of generative AI, and we are thrilled to be launching a product to close this gap!”
“It’s clear we’re entering a once-in-a-generation pivot point in software development. At Augment, not only do I get to work with many of the brightest minds in AI, we’re fortunate to have the backing of the world’s leading investors to fuel our vision. Augment’s AI platform naturally and seamlessly empowers every developer.”
– Scott Dietzen, CEO of Augment
“Augment is solving real world engineering challenges with their contextual awareness of our code base. We are seeing a >40% increase in developer productivity across the board.”
– CEO of Keeta, Ty Schenk
“AI has the potential to make software developers 10x more productive, but achieving this requires deep research into AI for code coupled with advanced systems engineering. It’s exciting to be part of a team that is uniquely positioned to deliver on this promise, and truly transform the way software development gets done.”
– Guy Gur-Ari, co-founder of Augment
“The best software comes from augmenting developers, not replacing them. We believe that AI technology can help developers stay focused on the joy of coding while eliminating the toil that can slow progress to a crawl. To achieve this vision, the AI needs to have an expert understanding of codebases, operate at the speed of thought, support teams instead of just individuals, and carefully protect intellectual property. As someone who has dedicated my career to meeting the needs of software engineers, I am confident that Augment is poised to deliver this new experience and revolutionize software development at scale.”
– Dion Almaer, VP of product at Augment
“We are strong believers in Augment’s potential to not only eat the code assistant market, but redefine how software engineering is performed at scale!”
– Shardul Shah, Partner, Index Partners
“At Lightspeed, we believe there’s a massive market opportunity for AI to transform software development. Augment’s exceptional team seamlessly empowers software engineers to deliver higher quality code far more easily, quickly and collaboratively. Lightspeed is thrilled to be joining Augment to help make the world’s software better.”
– Ravi Mhatre, Founder and Managing Director, Lightspeed
“Augment represents Sutter Hill Ventures’ first big bet on AI. This is an extremely talented team that marries the best in systems and cloud programming with unique breadth and depth in AI research. Great things are coming soon.”
– Palmer Rampell, Managing Director, Sutter Hill Ventures
“Meritech is thrilled to be backing an extraordinarily talented Augment team. In our due diligence, we found Augment’s depth and breadth of AI talent to be greater than that of all the other startups in the space combined.”
– Alex Clayton, General Partner, Meritech Capital
