Automation tools for enterprise software teams usually focus on streamlining logistical tasks such as deploying applications to production. Codota Dot Com Ltd., in contrast, wants to streamline the coding process itself, and the startup today picked up $12 million from a group of investors that included Khosla Ventures to pursue its vision.

The Series A round follows a period of rapid growth for Codota. The five-year-old startup claims that its installed base has increased over tenfold in the past year to more than a million programmers, including engineers at tech giants such as Amazon.com Inc. and Google LLC.

Codota touts its namesake product as a kind of autocomplete tool for software development. Codota plugs into developers’ code editors and uses patterns gleaned from millions of open-source repositories to provide the user with programming advice while they’re writing their application. The software can, for example, detect if the code for a database operation is vulnerable to a SQL injection attack and recommend a fix, as well as catch syntax errors that may lead to bugs.

Recommendations are generated by artificial intelligence models running under the hood. Codota provides its software for free and generates revenue through a paid version, Codota Enterprise, that allows companies to train the models on their own code to get better suggestions.

Codota will use the funding to enhance its machine learning capabilities. The planned upgrade will draw on technology that it obtained last year through the acquisition of TabNine Inc., a competing code recommendation startup.  

“Following the acquisition of TabNine, we have both semantic and textual models of code. We’re improving each one individually, but also gradually combining them to a unified predictive model that’s far superior to any of them alone,” Codota Chief Executive Officer Dror Weiss (pictured, fourth from right) wrote in a blog post. He added that the startup has plans to bring AI to more aspects of the software development process, though he didn’t go into detail.

In addition to Khosla Ventures, the startup’s $12 million round included contributions from TPY Capital, Hetz Ventures and e.ventures, which led the investment. Codota competes with Kite Inc., another startup offering AI-powered code autocomplete features that raised $17 million last year.

Photo: Codota