Supermaven Inc., a startup with an artificial intelligence coding assistant of the same name, today announced that it has closed a $12 million funding round led by Bessemer.

The investment also included contributions from several angel investors. The group included OpenAI co-founder John Schulman, Perplexity AI Inc. co-founder Denis Yarats and Intercom Inc. co-founder Eoghan McCabe.

Supermaven distributes its AI assistant in the form of an extension for popular code editors, the applications that developers use to write software. The assistant can analyze the snippet of code that an engineer is writing and generate autocomplete suggestions. Moreover, it’s capable of generating new snippets from scratch based on natural language instructions from the user. 

Supermaven supports two dozen programming languages. The list includes Java, Python and other enterprise mainstays as well as more specialized syntaxes such as Assembly. The latter language, which gives developers direct access to low-level processor features, is used to program systems such as connected devices.

Supermaven’s assistant is powered by an internally developed AI model called Babble that debuted in June. It’s 2.5 times the size of the company’s previous neural network and was trained on a larger corpus of code. It’s also faster: Supermaven says Babble can generate code suggestions three times quicker than the competition, which reduces wait times for developers.

Another selling point of the model is its context window. Supermaven says that Babble can ingest 4 million characters’ worth of code, which allows it to map out an application’s entire code base in some cases. This can improve the quality of the AI’s programming suggestions when it tackles tasks that require an understanding of how an application’s modules interact with one another.

Alongside Babble-powered code suggestions, Supermaven provides a sidebar called Supermaven Chat that it embeds into the user’s code editor. The feature offers access to large language models from OpenAI, Anthropic PBC and other AI companies. Developers can ask those models for programming advice and then paste the AI-generated suggestions from the Supermaven Chat sidebar into their code editor’s main window.

Supermaven will use its newly raised capital to build a code editor of its own. The reason, Chief Executive Officer Jacob Jackson explained in a blog post, is that some of the features Supermaven hopes to build for its AI assistant require the ability to display interface elements “inline with the code” written by developers. Third-party editors provide limited support for such interface customization.

Supermaven is the latest in a series of startups to have raised funding for AI tooling that streamlines software development. In April, Augment Inc. raised $227 million from former Google LLC CEO Eric Schmidt and other investors. Paris-based rival Poolside earlier closed a $126 million investment and is reportedly seeking an additional $400 million. 

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