On the first day of Y Combinator's winter 2024 session — a photo in front of the YC sign after the orientation — PearAI's founders “disbanded,” as founder Nan An described it to TechCrunch. Online hate is flooding in..
But they survived and graduated YC's Winter 2024 cohort earlier this month with an updated idea and a new initial product. Now they're also targeting $1 million in seed funding, Ang told TechCrunch, raising a total of $1.25 million including that. Standards of YC $375,000.
To review: On that Saturday in September; Ang and his co-founder Duke Pan have released a minimal proof-of-concept product version of their AI code editor on GitHub. They posted it on Twitter with chest pain. Influencer style YouTube video (The founders are YouTubers).
within hours Someone accused me of continuing their project as basically a copy of another open source code editor with few changes. (Founder of PairAI Still accused. removing Continue's name and doing a mass search and replace to insert them.) Worse yet, they're ridiculous; They released their product written under a creative license. ChatGPT. The surest way to cut off the open source community is to mess with licensing.
“We had a lot of mistakes in licensing,” Ang told TechCrunch, adding that the license has been fixed.
Panwa A bravado tweet Discussing how he quit his high-paying Coinbase job to run this startup and boasting that the product was “better than Copilot” drew more ire. Continue — Another YC Company — Participated in criticism. YC CEO Garry Tan while they He protected them.
On Sunday, there were young founders. He apologized.Move to a standard open source license and better document the open source work they support, among other concessions.
But they were left with the obvious feedback that there might not be room for another code editor. “We love coding and want to see it get better,” Ang said.
So they took the lemon and made AI coding lemonade, using the hate's feedback to update their product idea. instead of the editor itself. A “framework” is already being built that will allow AI coding tools to be used by programmers. behind the scenes This allows the tools to communicate and really work well together, says Ang. The front-end user interface “looks like you're using just one product instead of 10,” he said. The tool will integrate with many AI coding tools, including Continue.
While in public A suspectThere is also PearAI. He was praised. – A completely different experience than the last time we launched.
Investors in the seed round include Goodwater Capital; Multimodal Ventures; Orange Fund Includes Exitfund and certain unnamed investors.