September 17, 2024
While still a computer science student at the University of Waterloo, Jacob Jackson co-founded Tabnine, an AI coding assistant company, launching his career in AI early. In 2019, as Jackson was finishing his final exams, Tabnine raised about $60 million in venture capital and was sold to Codata. After that, he started working as an intern at OpenAI until 2022, when he made the decision to start a new company that would improve developer workflows.
Jackson developed Supermaven, an AI coding platform that expands on his experience with Tabnine but features major technology enhancements, thanks to his inspiration from AI tool developments such as ChatGPT and GitHub Copilot. Babble, Supermaven's in-house AI model, has a million-token pop-up that allows it to analyze a lot of code at once. This makes the model more reliable in producing accurate code by allowing it to handle large inputs without “forgetting” recent data or straying from the topic.
Supermaven matches competitors like Google's Code Assist with 1 million tokens, despite the fact that some AI coding platforms, like Magic, offer considerably larger pop-ups (Magic supports 100 million tokens). According to Jackson, Supermaven's unique selling point is its reduced latency, made possible by an innovative internal neural architecture. Additionally, the platform takes just 10-20 seconds to process a developer's code repository, learning coding rules and APIs so it can keep running quickly, even with large code bases.
The AI coding tools market is expected to grow rapidly and reach $27.17 billion by 2032, according to forecasts. More than 1.8 million GitHub Copilot users are among the many developers who have already integrated AI into their processes. But the sector has many obstacles to overcome, particularly when it comes to intellectual property and data privacy. Fearful of disclosing PIN, many companies are hesitant to use AI coding tools. Additionally, copyrighted code has been known to be regurgitated by AI models in some cases, putting developers in legal jeopardy if they include it in their work without realizing it. .
Jackson emphasized in a talk with Techcrunch that while Supermaven retains data for a brief period to maximize system performance, it does not use consumer data to build its models. Reducing exposure to dangerous content during training, he emphasized that the focus was on publicly accessible code, but he did not completely rule out the possibility that Babble would be taught on IP-protected code.
Supermaven has grown significantly in popularity despite these obstacles, with over 35,000 developers using the platform. Since the company launched in February, its user base has tripled and many of those customers are signing up for premium plans. The company's annual recurring revenue reached $1 million.
Due to the success of the platform, investors are taking note. Recently, Supermaven revealed that the company had completed its first external investment round, raising $12 million from angel investors and Bessemer Venture Partners, which included Perplexity and OpenAI co-founders John Schulman and Denis Yarats. The money will be used to improve Supermaven's text editor, which is currently in beta, and to hire more developers, setting the company up for long-term success in the fast-growing field of computer coding AI.