AI coding assistance startup Augment Inc.  announced its $227 million Series B round at a $977 million post-money valuation with investments from Sutter Hill Ventures, Index Ventures, Innovation Endeavors, Lightspeed Venture Partners and Meritech Capital.

This brings Augment’s total funding to $252 million, following its $25 million Series A led by Sutter Hill Ventures.

The latest capital infusion will be used by Augment to accelerate product development and build out its product, engineering and go-to-market functions as the company gears up for rapid growth.

The company is founded by Igor Ostrovsky, former chief architect at Pure Storage and software engineer at Microsoft, and Guy Gur-Ari, an AI researcher who hails from Google.

It is led by industry veterans Scott Dietzen, whose previous leadership experience includes Pure Storage, Yahoo! and WebLogic / BEA Systems, and Dion Almaer, an alumnus of Google, Shopify, Mozilla and Palm.

Augment’s engineering team boasts deep AI and systems expertise, with alumni from Google, Meta, NVIDIA, Microsoft, Databricks, Snowflake, VMware and Pure Storage.

Sutter Hill Ventures Managing Director Mike Speiser said, “Augment has built a truly brilliant team, among the best in enterprise AI, and as good as any team we have ever helped put together.

They have a stellar track record of delivering best-in-class solutions and leading companies from early stage to category leader to IPO. We are already seeing great things from Augment Inc, and we are just getting started.”

Over $1 trillion is spent on software engineering annually, according to Gartner, yet most companies remain dissatisfied with the programs they produce and consume.

Software is too often fragile, complex and expensive to maintain with development teams bogged down with long backlogs for feature requests, bug fixes, security patches, integration requests, migrations and upgrades.

AI is hailed as the long-awaited remedy, with Gartner predicting that “by 2027, 50% of enterprise software engineers will use ML-powered coding tools.”

However, current AI coding assistants don’t adequately understand the programmer’s intent, improve software quality nor facilitate team productivity, and they don’t properly protect intellectual property. In fact, a 2023 Gartner report on AI and developer experience found that tools like pair programming currently only offer “incremental, quality-of-life improvements to developers rather than significant boosts in productivity.”

As Eric Schmidt, Founding Partner at Innovation Endeavors and former CEO of Google explained, “Software remains far too expensive and painful to develop. AI is poised to transform coding, and after surveying the landscape, we came away convinced that Augment has both the best team and recipe for empowering programmers and their organizations to deliver more and better software.”

“Software engineering is rapidly evolving into a collaboration between human and artificial intelligence,” observed Igor Ostrovsky, co-founder of Augment Inc. “At Augment, we are working with extraordinary focus to empower teams around the world with AI, enabling them to build better software.”

“As large language models emerged a few years ago, this team saw their potential to make programming dramatically more productive and yield much higher-quality software,” said Scott Dietzen, CEO of Augment Inc. “Current AI for code platforms are falling well short of realizing the potential of generative AI, and we are thrilled to be launching a product to close this gap!”

CEO of Keeta, Ty Schenk, explained, “Augment is solving real world engineering challenges with their contextual awareness of our code base. We are seeing a >40% increase in developer productivity across the board.”

“AI has the potential to make software developers 10x more productive, but achieving this requires deep research into AI for code coupled with advanced systems engineering,” shared Guy Gur-Ari, co-founder of Augment Inc. “It’s exciting to be part of a team that is uniquely positioned to deliver on this promise, and truly transform the way software development gets done.”

“The best software comes from augmenting developers, not replacing them. We believe that AI technology can help developers stay focused on the joy of coding while eliminating the toil that can slow progress to a crawl. To achieve this vision, the AI needs to have an expert understanding of codebases, operate at the speed of thought, support teams instead of just individuals, and carefully protect intellectual property,” explained Dion Almaer, VP of product at Augment Inc. “As someone who has dedicated my career to meeting the needs of software engineers, I am confident that Augment is poised to deliver this new experience and revolutionize software development at scale.”

Dietzen continued, “It’s clear we’re entering a once-in-a-generation pivot point in software development. At Augment, not only do I get to work with many of the brightest minds in AI, we’re fortunate to have the backing of the world’s leading investors to fuel our vision. Augment’s AI platform naturally and seamlessly empowers every developer.”