UPDATED 14:26 EST / NOVEMBER 14 2024

AI

AI-powered developer tooling startup Tessl raises $125M

Tessl AI Ltd., a startup using artificial intelligence to streamline software development and maintenance, today announced that it has raised $125 million in funding.

The bulk of the capital, $100 million, arrived in the form of a recent Series A round led by Index Ventures. Accel chipped in as well. Tessl earlier raised a $25 million seed investment that was jointly led by boldstart and Alphabet Inc.’s GV startup fund. The company is now reportedly valued at $750 million.

London-based Tessl is developing an AI platform that will make it possible to create software with natural language prompts. According to the company, the plan is enabling users to describe the application they wish to build in a high-level specification. Tessl’s algorithms will automatically turn customers’ specifications into code.

The platform will generate Java, JavaScript and Python code on launch. Java powers many enterprise applications, while JavaScript and Python are widely used for web development and AI projects, respectively. Tessl plans to add support for more languages down the line.

Besides generating software, the platform will also help developers maintain it. According to Tessl, its algorithms will be capable of automatically detecting any performance issues that may emerge in an application over time and fix them. The company also plans to offer features for spotting cybersecurity issues.

Guy Podjarny, Tessl’s founder and chief executive, previously launched software security specialist Snyk Ltd. The latter startup received a $7.4 billion valuation in its most recent funding round. 

Tessl’s software maintenance features won’t be limited to fixing security and performance issues. According to the company, its AI will also be capable of detecting changes in the external components on which a program depends to work.

Enterprise applications often interact with external services through application programming interfaces, or APIs. An API can change over time as the application to which it provides accessed is updated with new features. When such changes occur, the workloads that rely on the API must be modified as well, a task Tessl hopes to streamline with its platform.

The company plans to add support for more use cases over time. According to Tessl, the plan is to equip its platform with the ability to collect telemetry about an application and analyze the data to identify areas for improvement. “Implementations will be customizable, refined to your specific environment based on your data, and enabling dynamic changes like prioritized speed at peak hours vs costs overnight,” Podjarny wrote in a blog post today.

Tessl expects to launch the platform in early 2025. According to the company, it will allow customers to build more sophisticated applications than competing coding assistants. Tessl envisions developers using its platform to build a variety of services including web and mobile apps. 

The company’s funding milestone comes weeks after Poolside, another startup in the process of building an AI-powered coding platform, disclosed a $500 million raise. It used the capital to build a cluster of 10,000 Nvidia Corp. graphics cards. The chips will enable Poolside to train large language models optimized for coding tasks.

Image: Unsplash

A message from John Furrier, co-founder of SiliconANGLE:

Your vote of support is important to us and it helps us keep the content FREE.

One click below supports our mission to provide free, deep, and relevant content.  

Join our community on YouTube

Join the community that includes more than 15,000 #CubeAlumni experts, including Amazon.com CEO Andy Jassy, Dell Technologies founder and CEO Michael Dell, Intel CEO Pat Gelsinger, and many more luminaries and experts.

“TheCUBE is an important partner to the industry. You guys really are a part of our events and we really appreciate you coming and I know people appreciate the content you create as well” – Andy Jassy

THANK YOU