AI code assist startup Graphite raises $52M to try and keep ahead of the competition

New York City-based artificial intelligence code review startup Graphite, officially known as Screenplay Studios Inc., said today it has raised $52 million in a Series B round of funding.

Today’s round was led by Accel and saw participation from Menlo Ventures through Anthology Fund, which is a $100 million initiative launched in partnership with the AI giant Anthropic PBC. A host of other high-profile backers, including Shopify Ventures, Figma Ventures, Andreessen Horowitz and The General Partnership were also involved in the round.

Graphite was founded in 2020 by its Chief Executive Merrill Lutsky and others in early 2020, when it began life as a mobile development tooling company, but shortly after it entered that business it pivoted to focus on code review. Nowadays, it uses AI agents to automate that code review processes, providing feedback that aims to flag errors and other oversights as developers are compiling fresh code.

The startup’s code reviewer is called Diamond and it’s powered by large language models from Anthropic and OpenAI. It works by automatically summarizing pull requests, transforming comments into actionable code suggestions. Through its instantaneous, high-signal feedback, the company claims Diamond is able to catch everything from bugs to logic errors to style inconsistencies and security vulnerabilities.

In addition to catching these problems, Diamond will suggest changes based on human developer’s comments on codebases. It can also summarize sections of code to explain what the intent or purpose is.

Diamond sounds impressive, but it’s worth noting that Graphite faces intense competition from dozens of other AI coding assistants. Its biggest rival is GitHub Inc.’s Copilot, and then there are dozens of other startups, including Poolside Inc., Augment Inc., Magic AI Inc. and Codeium Inc. There are much bigger players too, such as OpenAI, which recently introduced code editing tools in its macOS ChatGPT application, Google LLC has its Code Assist tools, and Anthropic has its own assistive programming tool too.

Despite these challengers, Graphite has won over plenty of developers by reassuring them of the reliability of its code suggestions. Unlike many of those other tools, users can define patterns that are unique to any single codebase, then set up filters to catch sensitive information that might compromise its security.

Rama Sekhar of Menlo Ventures said Graphite’s Diamond “sets a new standard for code review, ensuring teams can trust and scale AI-generated code.”

Whatever the reason, Graphite appears to be growing pretty fast. It claims to have grown its revenue by more than 20 times in the last year, scaling its platform to serve engineers at more than 500 companies, including Shopify Inc., Snowflake Inc. and Perplexity AI Inc.

To increase the attractiveness of its platform, Graphite is making its core code review offering freely available to teams of all sizes, having previously only allowed free access to teams of 10 or less.

Looking ahead, Graphite said it plans to use the money from today’s round to accelerate product development and grow its New York-based team.

“Graphite is becoming the go-to tool for the world’s most forward-thinking engineering teams,” said Accel Partner Christine Esserman. “It’s becoming the canonical layer where humans and agents collaborate on code.”

Image: Graphite