AI coding assistants are becoming wildly popular, with the vast majority of respondents in GitHub’s latest poll saying that they’ve adopted AI tools in some form. Y Combinator partner Jared Friedman recently claimed that a quarter of YC’s W25 startup batch have 95% of their codebases generated by AI.
Sensing an opportunity, VCs are rushing to back startups developing AI-powered assistive programming tools. One of these startups, Graphite, on Tuesday announced that it raised $52 million in a Series B round led by Accel, with participation from Anthropic’s Anthology Fund with Menlo Ventures, Shopify Ventures, Figma Ventures, Andreessen Horowitz and The General Partnership.
Tomas Reimers, Greg Foster, and Merrill Lutsky founded Graphite in 2020. Reimers is an ex-Facebook software dev, whereas Foster was an engineer at Airbnb and Google. Lutsky previously founded Posmetrics, a customer feedback solutions firm.
Graphite began its life as a mobile development tooling company, but it pivoted to code review shortly after opening up shop. Today, Graphite’s platform gives feedback on code, leveraging AI — specifically Anthropic’s and OpenAI’s models — to flag errors and possible oversights.
“Graphite started as an internal tool we built to solve our own pain around code review,” Lutsky told TechCrunch. “We shared what we built with a few ex-Meta engineers, who quickly shared it more broadly, and soon the demand for Graphite became too loud to ignore.”
Graphite also suggests code changes from developer comments on codebases, summarizes code, and generates possible fixes for code failures. For the startup’s next act, Graphite is spinning out Diamond, an AI tool designed to catch coding bugs and errors automatically, as a standalone product.
There’s a lot of competition in the AI coding assistant space. Beyond GitHub Copilot and well-funded efforts like Cursor maker Anysphere, Poolside, Augment, Magic, and Codeium, startups CodeRabbit and DeepCode both focus specifically on AI-powered code review applications. OpenAI recently updated its macOS ChatGPT app to directly edit code in popular app dev tools, and Anthropic — one of Graphite’s financial backers — has an assistive programming tool of its own.
Graphite has managed to carve out a niche for itself, however, partly by working to allay customers’ fears of the reliability risks associated with AI-powered assistive coding tools. Unlike some tools on the market, Graphite lets customers define patterns unique to a codebase and set up filters for sensitive information that might compromise a codebase’s security.
“Revenue grew 20x in 2024, and we’ve scaled to serving tens of thousands of engineers at more than 500 companies, including Shopify, Snowflake, Figma, and Perplexity,” Lutsky said. “Combined with our revenue growth, this new funding gives us many years of runway, a clear path to profitability, and the resources to invest aggressively in growth and AI.”
To make its platform even more attractive, Graphite has made its core code review offering free for teams of all sizes. Previously, only groups of 10 or fewer could use the company’s tools at no charge.
With the latest round of funding, Graphite has raised around $81 million in venture capital to date. The 30-person startup says that the newest tranche will be put toward product development and growing its NYC-based team.
