AI startup Poolside nears $3 billion valuation
Summary
Poolside, a startup creating artificial intelligence to write software, is in talks to raise a new round of funding that would give it a $3 billion valuation even before releasing an initial product, according to people familiar with the deal. The large investment in the nascent company shows the continued investor appetite for AI startups, even as the public markets have cooled on the technology’s immediate commercial payoffs. Paris-based Poolside was formed in early 2023 by Jason Warner, the former chief technology officer of coding repository GitHub, and Eiso Kant, a software entrepreneur. Poolside’s approach differs from that of Mistral, which offers a code-generation model but is primarily targeting corporate customers, the person said. Poolside has signed multiple deals for access to powerful Nvidia Corp. GPUs with Iris Energy Ltd., an Australian data center company that provides computing resources for Bitcoin mining and AI.