On the first day of Y Combinator's Winter 2024 session, shortly after orientation and taking photos in front of the YC sign, PearAI's founders were “canceled,” as founder Nang Ang explained to TechCrunch. , received a barrage of hate online.
But they survived and graduated from YC's Winter 2024 class earlier this month with a revised idea and a new initial product. Now, they have also reached their $1 million seed funding goal and have raised a total of $1.25 million, including YC's standard deal of $375,000, Ang told TechCrunch.
Summary: That Saturday in September, Ang and his co-founder Duke Pan released a proof of concept, minimal viable production version of their AI code editor on GitHub. They started with heart-pounding tweets and influencer-style YouTube videos (the founders are YouTubers).
Within hours, someone accused their project of being essentially a copy of Continue, another open source code editor, with very few changes. (PairAI's founders were even accused of doing a massive search and replace to remove Continue's name and add their own.) Worse than that, they started using ChatGPT released the product under a funky, made-up license written in . The surest way to piss off the open source community is to mess up the license.
“There were certainly a lot of mistakes regarding the license,” Ang told TechCrunch, claiming that the license has since been corrected.
Pang's bravado tweets, in which he talked about how he quit a high-paying Coinbase job to run the startup and boasted that the product was “already better than Copilot,” sparked further outrage. Instigated. Continue — Another YC Company — attended to criticize Meanwhile, YC CEO Gary Tan defended them.
By Sunday, the young founders had apologized, moved to a standard open source license, and better documented the open source efforts that underpinned them, among other concessions.
However, there was also clear feedback that there may not be room for yet another code editor. “We love coding, so we hope it gets even better,” Anne said.
So they took lemons and made AI-coding lemonade, using hateful feedback to revise their product idea. Instead of an editor itself, they are now building a “framework” that curates AI coding tools, allowing programmers to use multiple tools. The back end allows the tools to communicate and “really work well together,” Ahn said. The front end standardizes the user interface so “it looks like you're using one product instead of 10,” he said. This tool integrates with many AI coding tools, including Continue.
Despite some skepticism, PearAI has also received praise. It's a completely different experience than the last time I launched it.
Investors in the seed round also include Goodwater Capital, Multimodal Ventures, Orange Fund, Exit Fund, and an anonymous angel investor, Ang said.