After causing outrage on the first day of Y Combinator, AI code editor PearAI pockets $1M
On the first day of Y Combinator’s 2024 winter session — right after an orientation and photo shoot in front of the YC sign — the PearAI co-founders “cancelled,” as founder Nang Ang described it to TechCrunch, Receive a wave of online hate.
But they survived and graduated YC’s winter class of 2024 earlier this month with a revised idea and a new prototype product. They have now also achieved their goal of $1 million in seed funding, Ang tells TechCrunch, raising a total of $1.25 million, including Standard YC deal Valued at $375,000.
To recap: On a Saturday in September, Ang and his co-founder, Duke Pan, released a viable proof-of-concept product version of their AI code editor on GitHub. They launched with a heartfelt tweet and An impactful YouTube video (The founders are YouTubers.)
Within hours, someone accused his project of being essentially a copy of another open source code editor, Continue, with very few changes. (The founders of PairAI Even the accused (from performing a mass search and replace to remove the name “Continue” and add his name.) Worse still, they released their product under a funky, made-up license written in ChatGPT. The surest way to piss off the open source community is to mess with the license.
“We definitely made a lot of mistakes in the license,” Ang told TechCrunch, insisting that the license has since been fixed.
Pan Brave tweet Discussing how he left his high-paying job at Coinbase to do this startup and bragging that the product was “actually better than Copilot” fueled more anger. Follow — Other YC Company — I was involved in criticism Them, while YC CEO Gary Tan Defend them.
By Sunday, the young founders had done just that I apologizehave moved to a standard open source license, and documented the open source work that best supports their work, among other privileges.
But they were also left with the clear feedback that there might not be room for another code editor. “We love programming, and we want to see it done better,” Ang said.
So they took lemons and made lemonade into AI programming, using hate feedback to tweak their product idea. Instead of the editor itself, they are now building a “framework” that will coordinate AI coding tools, allowing programmers to use multiple tools. Ultimately, it allows the tools to communicate “and work well together,” Ang said. The front-end will unify the user interface so that “it feels like I’m using one product instead of 10,” he said. The tool will integrate with several AI programming tools, including Follow.
While there is some audience SkepticsPearAI has too I got kudos – A completely different experience than the last time it was released.
Ang says seed investors include Goodwater Capital, Multimodal Ventures, Orange Fund, Exitfund, and some angel investors he did not name.
