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Many startups and big tech companies have put effort into building AI for software programming. Now, another new player is stepping out of the shadows to throw his hat into the ring, on a mission to fix the many problems that will arise when humans and all those AIs write code together.
Tessel The company is building what it describes as a “native AI” platform that developers and their teams can use to create and maintain software, and on Thursday it opened a waiting list for those interested in trying it out.
We say “under construction” for good reason: Tessl’s product hasn’t been launched yet, and the plan is to have it ready early next year. But the London-based startup is now sharing more about what it’s doing with some financial hype: Tessl has quietly raised $125 million via a seed round and a Series A, both of which are being announced for the first time today. The latest round is led by Index Ventures, with participation from Accel, GV and Boldstart. GV (aka Google Ventures) and Boldstart co-led the seed round.
TechCrunch has confirmed with multiple sources that Tessl’s post-money valuation is at $500 million.
As you may have guessed, one of the reasons a company that doesn’t have customers or a shipped product gets this kind of attention from blue-chip venture capital is because of who’s building it.
The CEO and founder of Tessl is Guy Podjarny, a developer whisperer of sorts. His last startup was Snyk, a cybersecurity company that was last valued (in 2022) at $7.4 billion. Before that, he was CTO at Akamai, a role he took on after Akamai acquired its first startup, Blaze, which focused on speeding up website load times.
“Podjarny has an incredibly insightful and thoughtful approach to his business,” said Carlos Gonzalez Cadenas, a partner at Index who led the investment. “He’s very good (at understanding) developer communities and building developer-oriented businesses.”
Podjarny said in an interview that the concept for Tessl grew out of his experience at Snyk.
Snake focuses on discovering (and fixing) vulnerabilities in code, and Podjarny notes that a similar problem is becoming more pressing with code and software interoperability in general — particularly due to the rapid expansion of code automatically written by AI.
“What does AI do for software development?” He remembers asking himself. The answer was: speed it up, but also create more of it automatically. Maintaining and shipping updates to this code will increase complexity and chances of systems crashing. This ultimately causes a lot of ill effects (security, uptime, cost, efficiency) to organizations. “The more that image formed in my mind, the more I knew I was going to build this,” he said.
The startup’s name, Tessl, is a nod to “mosaic,” Podjarny says, because it aims to make sure the software and the code behind it fit together neatly, rather than existing in a messy, overlapping patchwork.
Podjarny has been cautious about the types of applications or code he envisions creating or maintaining on Tessl. But it looks like it’s going to start really small.
“We’re not sharing the full strategy yet on what those are,” he said of the targeted applications or use cases. “I would say we’re not starting with matches. We’re starting with relatively simple software that allows us to build a comprehensive system that is more manageable for LLMs to create, and more manageable for humans to define. We will evolve from there.”
The basic idea behind the startup is something like this: Developers and their teams (which include product managers and others who don’t program) can submit specifications to Tessl in the form of natural language or code. Tessl will then write code that conforms to those specifications.
Teams can test this code in a sandbox, where issues can be flagged and addressed, and continue to modify the specifications as needed. Tessl can then be automated to maintain that code according to those specifications. So, if something else is at risk of breaking due to the new code, Tessl will run a remediation process to identify that and fix it.
It appears that the Tessl was not designed as a walled garden. Podjarny said he is talking with others who have built or are building AI programming assistants, with the idea that the work of these other platforms will also be maintainable using Tessl.
It appears that the Tessl was not designed as a walled garden. Podjarny said he is talking with others who have built or are building AI coding assistants, with the idea that the work produced by these other platforms will also be maintainable using Tessl. This means that although it would theoretically compete with the likes of Anysphere’s Cursor, Poolside, GitHub’s Copilot, Magic, Codeium, and Augment, OpenAI, IBM And many more, it will also likely work with whatever the team uses.
Podjarny added that the startup will initially aim to support Java, Javascript and Python, and will add more languages over time.
One of the reasons investors love and support the idea is scalability. Maintaining code is something that has “a lot of signals” as being important right now, Gonzalez-Cadenas said. “But he is building a registration system here,” he added. “Once you do that, there are a variety of opportunities.”
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