Former GitHub CTO Jason Warner Raises $26 Million for Foundation Model Code Startup

Warner steps back from Redpoint to lead Poolside. Redpoint leads seed round.

Jason Warner — who joined Redpoint Ventures two years ago as a managing director — has raised a $26 million seed round for an artificial intelligence company focused on software and code called Poolside that he co-founded with serial entrepreneur Eiso Kant.

Warner came to me with the news, which I’m reporting exclusively. We spent some time talking yesterday about his decision to found Poolside and give up investing full-time.

Warner, the former chief technology officer at GitHub whose team oversaw the creation of GitHub Copilot, has enormous ambitions for the new startup. “The only competitor we think about is OpenAI,” Warner told me. “We are going after narrow AGI through software and code.”

Warner, who was also the vice president of engineering at Heroku for three years, said he is building a service that could potentially have GitHub Copilot or Replit’s Ghostwriter as customers. He described GitHub’s Copilot, which assists coders with artificial intelligence, as an “interface” while describing what he hopes to build with Poolside as a “subsystem.”

“We are a frontier thing. We are going to be exploring uncharted territory,” he said. “We feel like we are blazing ground.”

Warner and Kant came up with the idea for Poolside while working on — what else — a podcast. While recording Developing Leadership, the duo dreamed up their idea for a frontier AI company trained on code, software, and Git repositories.

Redpoint’s Erica Brescia and Jacob Effron are leading the investment with Brescia taking the board seat. Redpoint is contributing $20 million of the seed round.

Warner says Poolside is already in talks with a large technology company about a partnership. “We are targeting a trillion parameter model,” Warner said. “When we talked to the hyperscaler, we went from cloud scaler credits to C-level of conversations really quickly.”