At first glance, Qodo, the startup formerly known as CodiumAI, may seem like yet another AI code generation tool. But the team, which today announced a $40 million Series A round led by Susa Ventures and Square Peg, is as focused on code generation as it is on testing and overall code quality.
The service was launched in secret 18 months ago, and the company says more than 1 million developers have tried its solution and many Fortune 100 companies have adopted its enterprise platform.
One of Qodo's key differentiators is that while the company offers the usual Visual Studio Code and JetBrains extensions to incorporate Qodo Gen tools into your IDE, it also supports GitHub, GitLab, and Atlassian's BitBucket. It also provides a git agent to do this. Chrome extensions and CLI tools.
“We call ourselves the first quality-first code generation platform for complex code,” Qodo CEO and co-founder Itamar Friedman told me. “We believe it needs to be integrated into the entire software development lifecycle to enable quality-first code generation.”
Image credit: Codium
Friedman said each of the company's tools is aimed at mitigating bugs and issues in different parts of the coding and deployment process. “It's death by 1,000 disconnections, and we want to address each and every one of them in our vision. So depending on where the bugs and issues occur and where we can catch them. We have to deal with that, so we're consolidating in a lot of places.”
Another interesting thing about Qodo is that it gives developers the option to write out in natural language the problem they are trying to fix and how they want to address it. This way, Qodo knows what you're trying to do when you start manipulating the code directly. Friedman called this “task-aware coding.” While agents don't try to solve problems directly, code completion tools can recognize what you're trying to do and make suggestions focused on that.
After writing code, developers can access Qodo's test generation service within the IDE.
Then, once the code is pushed to GitHub, Qodo's tools allow reviewers to immediately see changes and potential issues. Friedman said the team is actually considering extending the tool to automatically create videos explaining changes to reviewers. “Humans are still involved, but we need to make it easier for humans to check.” [the code]'' Friedman said.
Image credit: Qodo
Friedman argued that by covering the entire lifecycle, individual tools can also learn from each other. For example, if your reviewers consistently give you similar comments about your code, a code suggestion tool can take that into account.
“AI agents are playing an increasingly important role in software creation, and we believe a quality-first approach is key to widespread adoption of AI agents in the enterprise,” Yonatan Sela of Square Peg says. “Enterprise developers aren't 'starting from scratch'; their code has to work harmoniously with tens of thousands of lines of code that already exist.”
Looking to the future, the Qodo team also plans to extend the service to test the code from the user interface. The new service, tentatively called Qodo UX, behaves like a human using a company's website to test user interface bugs.
“Someone might say, 'Okay, let's do an end-to-end test.' But if you do an end-to-end test and find a bug, you don't know where it is, and all You can't really prove that you've tested it either. Each type of test has its own strengths and weaknesses. We started with the units and features. [testing]. Then we grew sincerely. Next quarter is UX testing. ”
In addition to Susa Ventures and Square Peg, Firestreak Ventures and ICON Continuity Fund also participated in the round, along with seed investors TLV Partners and Vine Ventures. The $40 million Series A round brings the company's total funding to $50 million.