// Workers AI · dad joke modeWhy did Poolside AI go for a swim? It wanted to dive into data.
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| Industry | Artificial intelligence |
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| Founded | 2023 |
| Headquarters | San Francisco, United States[1] |
Key people |
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| Products | |
| Website | poolside.ai |
| Part of a series on |
| Artificial intelligence (AI) |
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| Glossary |
Poolside AI (or Poolside) is an American artificial intelligence company that develops large language models for computer software and coding applications.[2][3][4]
History
[edit source]Poolside AI was founded in early 2023 by Jason Warner, former CTO of GitHub, and Eiso Kant, a software entrepreneur.[2] The company started with a work from home model and had employees in the United States, United Kingdom and France.[5]
The first phase of Poolside's Project Horizon, a 2-gigawatt artificial intelligence campus located in Pecos County, Texas, started in October 2025.[6] The data center will be one of the largest in the United States.[7]
As of December 2025, Poolside has 150 employees worldwide. It is headquartered in San Francisco and invites its employees to a monthly concentrated work week at its Paris branch.[5]
Funding
[edit source]Within its first year, Poolside secured seed funding of $26 million, followed by an additional $100 million funding round.[8][9] In October 2024, the company raised $500 million in a Series B funding round led by Bain Capital, DST Global and eBay, among others, which brought its valuation to $3 billion.[10][11][12] Poolside had shown a demonstration of its code assistant to these investors using the prompt "Write me the code for a snake video game in python".[2][7][11]
In October 2025, Nvidia announced that it would invest up to $1 billion in Poolside which would quadruple its valuation to $12 billion.[7]
Models
[edit source]Poolside released the 118-billion-parameter open-weights large language model Laguna S 2.1 in July 2026 under the OpenMDW license. At the time of release, co-CEO Warner stated that the company intended to develop larger models.[13][14]
Partnerships
[edit source]In December 2024, Poolside and Amazon Web Services (AWS) announced a partnership to provide AI products on Amazon Bedrock and Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud. This partnership allows businesses to deploy Poolside's foundation models within their existing AWS environment.[15]
Poolside has signed contracts with the United States Department of Defense, RTX Corporation, and other companies in the American defense industrial base, while working to sell its autonomous software development engine to Israeli defense companies.[5]
Activity
[edit source]The company competes in two sectors with other AI companies, building both large language models and autonomous development products.[5] Poolside's software uses natural-language prompts from developers to create and test code, and the company's models are specifically designed for software development instead of general tasks.[5][11][16] A system called Model Factory is used to train Poolside's models and evaluate the outcome of the training.[5]
References
[edit source]- ↑ Emily Forgash; Rose Henderson (October 15, 2025). "AI Startup Poolside Teams With CoreWeave on Massive Data Center". Bloomberg.
- 1 2 3 Berthelot, Benoit; Ghosh, Shona. "AI startup Poolside nears $3 billion valuation". Fortune.
- ↑ "Mistral AI, Poolside, H... Ces cinq start-up françaises à la pointe de l'IA". Сhallenges. February 10, 2025. Retrieved February 10, 2025.
- ↑ Leprince-Ringuet, Daphné (October 3, 2024). "'We have to build a very strong revenue engine': Poolside AI gets ready to release product after a year of secrecy". Sifted. Retrieved November 14, 2025.
- 1 2 3 4 5 6 Gilead, Assaf (December 15, 2025). "Poolside AI targets Israel's defense sector". Globes.
- ↑ McEwen, Mella. "Poolside and CoreWeave plan 2GW AI campus in Pecos County". Midland Reporter-Telegram.
- 1 2 3 Clark, Kate; Sun, Yazhou. "Nvidia to Invest Up to $1 Billion in AI Startup Poolside". Bloomberg.com.
- ↑ Digitale, Usine (June 21, 2024). "La start-up Poolside en passe de lever 400 millions de dollars pour son modèle d'IA dédié au code".
- ↑ "Poolside AI : La startup deviendrait française, Xavier Niel aurait investi". August 25, 2023.
- ↑ "Poolside lève 500M$ pour la GenAI appliquée au coding". October 4, 2024.
- 1 2 3 "Poolside Raises $500 Million to Build AI Coding Software". Bloomberg.
- ↑ "Poolside : Cette startup parisienne qui vise une valorisation de 3 milliards de dollars avant même son premier produit - Siècle Digital". September 16, 2024.
- ↑ Martin, Iain (July 21, 2026). "American Open-Source Labs Think They Can Beat China's Best AI Startups". Forbes. Retrieved July 23, 2026.
- ↑ Constantin, Ana Maria (July 21, 2026). "Poolside releases Laguna S 2.1, the open-weight coding model pitched as the West's answer to DeepSeek and Qwen". TNW. Retrieved July 23, 2026.
- ↑ "Poolside and AWS announce strategic agreement to enable secure, customized generative AI for software engineering on Amazon Bedrock and Amazon Elastic Cloud Compute (EC2)" (Press release).
- ↑ Krause, Reinhardt. "Palantir Stock: Why Poolside, Cursor, Sierra Will Pressure Software Incumbents". Investor's Business Daily.
