Codeium founders Douglas Chen and Varun Mohan
CodeiumGenerative AI can create poems, emails or artwork, but one of its most promising uses is its ability to write code.
Some companies, like Microsoft-owned Github, offer “copilots” that use AI to make coding suggestions, similar to autocomplete. Other companies, like Cognition or Magic, specialize in “agents” designed to carry out an entire coding project from start to finish. On Wednesday, Codeium, a buzzy AI startup that already makes its own copilot, unveiled a new tool called Windsurf, which provides a little bit of both.
The idea is to provide advanced automation strategically, while still keeping the developer in the driver seat. The goal is that by overseeing the code Windsurf writes, the developer can ensure it does exactly what they want, catching errors early on and making the code review process a lot faster.
In a demo video, a Codeium engineer prompts Windsurf to create a music visualizer that reacts to the beats and changes in a song. The software suggests coding actions and next steps while automating the gruntwork, but allows the engineer to tweak what it’s doing, like suggesting new features to build.
“We have an editor here that is almost melding the minds of both the developer as well as the AI as assistant,” CEO Varun Mohan told Forbes.
Generative AI tools for coding are already making their mark on the industry. Last month, Google CEO Sundar Pichai said more than a quarter of new code at the tech giant is being written by AI. The market is still nascent; research firm IDC estimates the market for AI coding tools will hit $4 billion by 2029. But the field has gained massive attention from investors, startups and big tech companies. In August, Codeium closed a $150 million Series C, vaultingthe company to a $1.25 billion valuation. The round, led by General Catalyst, also included existing investors Kleiner Perkins and Greenoaks.
Codeium is far from alone. The giant in the market is Github, owned by Microsoft, which makes its own copilot tool that has more than 1.3 million subscribers. Cognition, valued at $2 billion and backed by Founders Fund and Khosla Ventures, makes an AI agent called Devin that went viral in March. Anysphere, maker of the tool copilot Cursor, is reportedly the subject of a bidding war between investors that could value the company at up to $2.5 billion.
Codeium hopes to grab its own piece of that nascent market with a tool that straddles traditional and AI coding, allowing engineers to jump back and forth.
“If there’s a complex task that you’re doing, and you don’t want to have AI for this, you can manually do the work like you normally did,” Anshul Ramachandra, Codeium’s head of enterprise and partnerships, told Forbes. “And then when you want to pull AI back in.”
Additional reporting by Rashi Shrivastava.
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