Exclusive: SolveAI, at eight months old, raises $50 million to take on the AI coding tool race

In just eight months of existence, SolveAI has raised $50 million. 

That’s shorter than a pregnancy, but longer than an NFL season. The enterprise coding startup—incorporated in July by former Palantir engineer Steve Basher—has eleven employees, and raised its $5 million Accel-led pre-seed in August. Basher’s idea was simple: That an AI coding tool must be completely specific to the company using it.

“AI’s somewhat useless without context,” Basher told Fortune. “Context is everything. So, our product is: what framework do you build to capture a company’s context?”

SolveAI got its second funding bump in November, as Google Ventures led the London-based company’s $45 million Series A, Fortune has exclusively learned. The startup’s investors so far also include Northzone, Mantis VC, and NeverLift, along with Palantir CISO Mike LoSapio, Google DeepMind’s Pushmeet Kohli, and OpenAI’s Olivier Godement.

SolveAI is riding several waves, a high-velocity story in a fast-moving market. The company is, for example, operating in the hot but hypercompetitive AI coding tool space, which includes companies like Cursor (valued at $29.3 billion) and Lovable (valued at $6.6 billion). Lovable, in particular, is a worthwhile point of comparison, as in some sense it’s already scaling to do what SolveAI does—“vibe code,” or help non-technical people use natural language to build software. 

“Lovable is fantastic for consumers,” said Basher. “It’s built around people who don’t have technical opinions. But I think—beyond just Lovable, in the broader category—no one’s figured out how to cover that last-mile. No one’s yet figured out how to generate software that actually is as if the enterprise’s own engineers had written it.”

Basher believes that SolveAI can, yes, solve that last-mile for large companies looking to vibe code with their employees. Tom Hulme, GV managing partner, believes Basher and SolveAI can win on getting the details right.

“How enterprises write and deploy software is so nuanced that moving from prototypes to scalable production requires a deep understanding of this,” said Hulme via email. The endgame, he says, “allows a generation of bespoke, production-ready, and compliant software solutions.”

This gets Basher’s philosophy around what it means to find AI ROI, a subject of much consternation among enterprises. 

“The more we can understand about a company, the better we can serve it,” said Basher. “Why would anyone want to use anyone else? You want to use something that knows your company better than you do.”

See you tomorrow,

Allie Garfinkle
X: @agarfinks
Email: alexandra.garfinkle@fortune.com
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This story was originally featured on Fortune.com