Poolside

Poolside is an AI coding company founded in 2023, developing foundation models specifically designed for software engineering tasks. The company has raised over $500 million at a $3 billion valuation from investors including Bain Capital Ventures and DST Global.

Poolside's approach differs from general-purpose AI companies by training models exclusively on code and software engineering data, with a focus on reinforcement learning from code execution rather than just pattern matching on text. The company trains its models by having them actually write and run code, learning from the outcomes — an approach analogous to how AlphaGo learned by playing millions of games rather than just studying game transcripts.

Poolside represents one of the largest bets on the idea that specialized AI models trained specifically for coding — rather than general-purpose language models adapted for code — will ultimately be more capable software engineers. The company competes with Magic AI, Cognition Labs (Devin), and the coding capabilities of foundation model companies in the race to build AI that can truly function as an autonomous software developer.