Code-generating platform Magic challenges GitHub's Copilot with $23M in VC backing

▤ Summary

Magic, a startup developing a code-generating platform similar to GitHubs Copilot, today announced that it raised $23 million in a Series A funding round led by Alphabets CapitalG with participation from Elad Gil, Nat Friedman and Amplify Partners. I realized that combining LLMs trained on code with my research on neural memory and reinforcement learning might allow us to build an AI software engineer that feels like a true colleague, not just a tool. In turn, employees will grow their skills faster and will be able to move among high-impact projects with increased agility.Steinberger isnt revealing much about Magics technical underpinnings yet making it tough, frankly, to compare the tool with the competition. Its been used by over 1.2 million people, and GitHub is aggressively positioning it as an enterprise-scale tool, recently launching a corporate-focused plan called Copilot for Business.Copilots traction mightve contributed to the demise of Kite, a startup that was developing an AI-powered coding assistant not unlike Magics. He pointed to statistics showing that skilled software engineers who are increasingly hard to come by cost around $150,000 per year (and up) and that teams spend upward of 25% of their time integrating and maintaining their development toolchains.Not all programmers are likely to agree, particularly those affected by the tech industrys recent mass layoffs.

▦ Linked Companies

GitHub, Inc.

$1M to $5M