The adoption of AI coding assistants is on the rise, with a significant majority of respondents in GitHub's latest poll confirming their use of AI tools in some form. This trend has caught the attention of venture capitalists, who are now investing heavily in startups developing AI-powered assistive programming tools. One such startup, Graphite, has just announced a $52 million Series B funding round led by Accel, with participation from notable investors like Anthropic's Anthology Fund, Menlo Ventures, Shopify Ventures, Figma Ventures, Andreessen Horowitz, and The General Partnership.

Founded in 2020 by Tomas Reimers, Greg Foster, and Merrill Lutsky, Graphite initially focused on mobile development tooling but soon pivoted to code review. The startup's platform leverages AI models from Anthropic and OpenAI to provide feedback on code, flag errors, and suggest possible fixes. Graphite's toolset also includes features like code summarization and automatic generation of code changes based on developer comments.

In an interview with TechCrunch, Lutsky revealed that Graphite's platform was initially developed as an internal tool to address the founders' own pain points with code review. The tool's popularity grew rapidly as it was shared with ex-Meta engineers, eventually prompting the founders to spin it out as a standalone product. Today, Graphite's platform serves tens of thousands of engineers at over 500 companies, including prominent names like Shopify, Snowflake, Figma, and Perplexity.

Graphite's latest funding round brings the startup's total venture capital raised to around $81 million. The new investment will be used to drive product development and expand the company's 30-person team based in New York City. Notably, Graphite has made its core code review offering free for teams of all sizes, a move that is likely to further accelerate its adoption in the developer community.

The AI coding assistant space is becoming increasingly crowded, with competitors like GitHub Copilot, Cursor maker Anysphere, Poolside, Augment, Magic, and Codeium vying for market share. However, Graphite has managed to differentiate itself by addressing concerns around the reliability risks associated with AI-powered assistive coding tools. The startup's platform allows customers to define custom patterns unique to their codebase and set up filters for sensitive information, thereby mitigating security risks.

As part of its expansion plans, Graphite is also spinning out Diamond, an AI tool designed to automatically catch coding bugs and errors, as a standalone product. This move is likely to further solidify Graphite's position in the market and provide a competitive edge in the rapidly evolving AI coding assistant landscape.

The growing popularity of AI coding assistants has significant implications for the software development industry as a whole. As more developers turn to AI-powered tools to streamline their workflows, we can expect to see increased productivity, improved code quality, and faster time-to-market for software applications. With Graphite's latest funding round, the startup is well-positioned to play a leading role in shaping the future of software development.