Join top executives in San Francisco on July 11-12, to hear how leaders are integrating and optimizing AI investments for success. Learn More
Bito, a B2B startup from Menlo Park, New Jersey with over 100,000 users that describes itself as the “Swiss Army knife of capabilities” for software developers, has launched a new AI coding assistant powered by OpenAI’s popular ChatGPT large language model (LLM), and announced $3.2 million in new funding.
The assistant, dubbed Bito AI, can learn from a user’s own codebase — though importantly, it keeps all of this information on a user’s device, maintaining security and privacy by using a vector database to index and search their code, and routes only natural language queries to ChatGPT 3.5 and ChatGPT 4.
How Bito AI works
The new tool works by allowing developers to simply ask Bito AI to complete a software development task in one of 25 supported languages — for example, “write a Java function to authenticate a user and provide them a welcome message” — and returns results in 50 programming languages.
With Bito’s AI assistant, developers can generate unit tests, explain their code, add comments to their functions, improve code performance, check for known security issues and gain insight into technical concepts, among other features.
Event
Transform 2023
Join us in San Francisco on July 11-12, where top executives will share how they have integrated and optimized AI investments for success and avoided common pitfalls.
“Any developer at any sized company can use Bito,” said Amar Goel, Bito’s cofounder and CEO, in a phone call. He added that developers from 162 countries were among Bito’s signups so far, and that 32% of the Fortune 100 companies were represented among its users, though the user base skewed primarily toward startups. Goel also said that Bito AI is GDPR complaint.
Ultimately, the company aims to add other leading LLMs including Anthropic’s Claude to Bito AI.
As for why a developer would choose to use Bito AI over using the existing web interface of leading LLMs Goel told VentureBeat that Bito AI, and the entire Bito platform, plugs directly into a developer’s existing coding environment and workspace, meaning they would not have to toggle back and forth to a web page to get results. It also highlights, and allows them to approve or decline, suggested code snippets and changes.
Currently in its Alpha release, Bito AI is free to use and has been designed to work seamlessly with Visual Studio Code, JetBrains IDEs, and the CLI.
Developers using Bito have found it significantly enhances productivity. The AI-powered assistant can generate source code from natural language prompts, answer queries, and give feedback on existing code in any language. According to the company, developers use the platform almost 200 times per month and report a 31% increase in productivity, thanks to the time saved on routine tasks.
Bito’s origin story and backers
Bito was founded by Goel and Anand Das, formerly of the digital advertising company Pubmatic, and Mukesh Agarwal, a former product leader at Microsoft and Ernst & Young.
The startup’s latest funding round was spearheaded by Eniac Ventures and received support from The Cap Table Coalition, an organization dedicated to diversifying the venture capital landscape by creating investment opportunities for traditionally underrepresented groups. High-profile tech innovators, including Mohak Shroff, SVP of engineering at LinkedIn, and Sri Shivananda, CTO at PayPal, were also among the investors.
DJ Patil, general partner at GreatPoint Ventures and former chief data scientist of the United States and LinkedIn, believes that Bito’s engine can save developers an hour each day, while significantly enhancing the quality of production systems.
VentureBeat’s mission is to be a digital town square for technical decision-makers to gain knowledge about transformative enterprise technology and transact. Discover our Briefings.
Carl Franzen
Source link
