A San Francisco startup using artificial intelligence to automate software development has quintupled its total funding with $117 million in fresh capital to develop what it describes as an AI "coworker."
Magic AI closed the Series B round earlier this month, according to a securities filing. The new funding comes just about a year since Magic announced its last round, a $23 million Series A round, and brings the company's total funding to around $145 million.
Former GitHub CEO Nat Friedman and Daniel Gross led the round with participation from Elad Gil and CapitalG, according to an announcement posted to LinkedIn.
Magic is also backed by Sequoia Capital, which participated in the Series A round last year.
Magic CEO Eric Steinberger didn't respond to a request for comment, but in a LinkedIn post, he indicated that the company was hiring with the ambition of building an artificial general intelligence, or AGI — a lofty goal that industry giants like OpenAI are pursuing.
"I love my team a lot and sometimes it’s stressful but life has never been so fulfilling. If you want to build AGI on a small team of people who care a lot with thousands of GPUs, please apply :)," Steinberger wrote.
The company is developing AI-fueled tools for software developers which it has described as being more than a "copilot" — also the name of GitHub's competing coding assistant — but not meant to replace humans in the coding process.
"With [GitHub] Copilot, you have one completion at a time and after every completion, it forgets what it's done before," Steinberger told Bay Area Inno last year. "Whereas with Magic, it's just like a colleague, it remembers what it's done before. It remembers your codebase, and it can act within that much more complex setup of information."
Magic is competing with other generative AI-powered tools from companies including Microsoft-owned GitHub which has a product developed in partnership with OpenAI called Copilot. GitHub says it has more than 100 million developers using its platform.
San Francisco-based Replit is also building an AI-powered developer tools and has raised more than $200 million including a $95 million Series B round announced last year. Replit says it currently has 25 million developers using its systems.
