AI Agents Take Over Software Engineering

∆ Tech in the News

AI Act Approved - The EU Parliament approved the AI Act (523 - 46), banning some AI systems, subjecting “High-risk AI systems” to pre-market and lifecycle assessments, and opening a citizen complaints avenue.

UN AI Measure - The U.S. is leading a United Nations resolution supported by all 193 members to ensure AI is reliable, secure, and available to all countries.

Starship IFT3 - SpaceX's interplanetary ship completed its third (and most successful) test flight, reaching orbit before falling apart on re-entry.

AI News Deals - OpenAI licensed news content from two major European publishers, France’s Le Monde and Spain’s Prisa Media.

Tik Tok… - Former Treasury Sec. Steven Mnuchin is putting together an investor group to buy TikTok after a house bill limiting Chinese ownership.

The Hottest Thing in Tech this Week

AI Agents Take Over Software Engineering

AI Agents are hot property as Cognition AI launches from stealth this week to wow the industry with the world’s first fully autonomous AI software engineer; “Devin”. Cognition has raised $21M to date from Peter Thiel’s Founders Fund and former Twitter executive Elad Gil and Doordash co-founder Tony Xu. It is far from alone in the space, with notable AI commentator Chief AI Officer declaring “VC-backed AI employee startups” a trend, with a combined $419.4M raised in 2024 already.

Meet Devin

The consensus is Devin is going beyond a mere coding copilot, with epic reasoning advances and orchestration unlocking an unprecedented ability to ship entire web projects end to end. Devin’s core strengths are an ability to reliably parallelize and synthesize outputs from LMs, deeply integrating with a dev sandbox and the internet, and to collaborate with human co-workers. Devin remembers instructions, corrects its own errors, implements dev or designer feedback, provides progress reports and collaborates on project decisions. And, get this, Devin can even train and refine its own AI models.

Devin outperforms Claude 2 and GPT-4 on SWE benchmarking scoring 13.9% on real-world tasks vs 4.8% and 1.7%, respectively. So, are Software Engineers, Done? Not quite yet, more complex roles are likely safe for now, but it looks increasingly likely they will be working alongside AI Agents like Devin. As for some more repetitive junior developer roles, it’s not looking good.

Just The Beginning

Cognition’s website says that coding is “just the beginning” indicating it plans to launch AI agents for other job verticals. On a related note, Google DeepMind also just unveiled SIMA, a "generalist" AI agent that can navigate unfamiliar 3D game environments using only NL instructions. SIMA is only in the research phase, but it’s an important step forward in AI learning how to perform tasks in unfamiliar real-world settings. What all this means for the future of work and productivity is nothing short of transformative. Get ready for a brave new world.

Reach out if you want to free trial Cognition’s agent - [email protected] 

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Deals We’re Watching

Founders to Watch and Opportunities to Catch

Open Deals:

Looking to invest? Let us know if you want a warm intro —> [email protected]

1. AI/ML for Healthcare Admin Billing - Los Angeles - Simplify health documentation with translatable billing and QA for faster Dx coding. Post revenue. 20 Major healthcare clients in pipeline. Multiple awards for top 1% in industry. PMF/FMF. Serial entrepreneur/founder of medical group. Early traction. (Seed)

2. AI-agent for Professional Intros - Irvine, CA - Existing Tech/finance media company looking for growth funding to launch autonomous co-pilot that introduces founders/builders to individuals that can support their growth. Audience of ~600k active members. (Open to financing discussions).

3. AI-Powered Learning Platform - Florida - Recently exited unicorn co-founder and CTO launches new startup to revolutionize course creation. 25x faster development, 75%+ cost reduction. Lead investor secured. (Seed)

4. SEC-registered AI RIA Copilot - NYC - VC-backed, making complex financial planning accessible for underserved. Led by fintech entrepreneurs, post-revenue. (Seed)

5. Outbound B2B Campaign AI Co-Pilot - Lexington, MA - Turn any CRM into an AI optimized sales agent for personalized customer campaigns. Hubspot and Saleforce API integration. Post revenue. (Pre-Seed)

Raising for your startup? Send us your Open Round —> [email protected]

Closed Deals:

Industrial Vehicle Automation - California’s Applied Intuition closed a $250M Series E at $6B pmv backed by a16z, Porsche, Elad Gil and Lux Capital.

Open Source AI - California compute provider and AI research group Together AI is growing 3x p/mth with 45k devs and growing traffic, and has just raised $106M in a venture round led by Salesforce Ventures to expand its platform.

OpenAI-Backed - California startup Physical Intelligence launched its AI software for robots with $70M from Thrive, Khosla, Lux, OpenAI, & Sequoia.

Bearing Gifts - California’s Bear Robotics raised $60M from LG for its AI–powered wheeled hospitality server robots making LG the largest shareholder.

Democratizing Exchange Funds - San Fran, startup Cache makes exchange funds accessible to millions with a fund of 50 stocks and $900M+ in pending reservations. Cache just raised a $8.5M Seed led by First Round and Quiet.

Companies to Watch:

Nanonets - The SF workflow automation startup 4x’d its client base in ‘23, including 34%+ of Global Fortune 500 companies and achieved a 90%+ (STP) Processing rate. It also just closed a $29M Series B backed by Accel and YC.

Cyera - The NY AI Data security startup is raising $150M - $200M at a valuation of $1.55B, (up 3x from its $500M Series B valuation from Accel & Sequoia). Cyera has notable clients like LifeLabs and Mercury Financial.

The Funding Buzz

MGX - Mubadala, Abu Dhabi's sovereign wealth fund and AI firm G42 launched a new firm to invest in AI infrastructure, semiconductors, and AI core technologies. It’s expected to reach $100B in AUM in a few years.

TCG Labs-Soleil - A new VC fund/R&D hub partnership to create and back single-asset biotech companies raised a $400M fund.

Ballistic Ventures - Ted Schlein’s California VC firm raised a second $360M fund focused on incubating entrepreneurs and innovations in cybersecurity.

Eckuity Capital - The NY/UK VC investor closed its healthcare-focused Eckuity Capital Fund I at $150M to back startups working on therapeutics, medtech, and digital health including AI, robotics, IoT, 3D printing, genomics and more.

Next Ventures - Lance Armstrong's firm is targeting a $100M second fund with a focus on investing in early-stage healthcare startups.

Trending Tools and Buzzy Tech

Trending Tools

Juniper Square - Full VC firm solution for fundraising, investor ops, and admin.

Deepgram - Aura, a low-latency API for conversational AI agents.

Verve Motion - Wearable robotics backpack helps lift heavy loads with ease.

Buzzy Tech

Vision Pro Surgery - Apple’s AR headset used to perform spinal surgery.

Primordial Soup - Lab replicates part of artificial life creation process in lab.

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