After creating a frenzy on Y Combinator’s first day, AI code editor PearAI raises $1 million in investment.

On the first day of Y Combinator’s 2024 winter session — right after an orientation and a photo op in front of the YC sign — PearAI’s founders were “discharged,” founder Nang Ang described to TechCrunch. spreading hate online.

But they survived and graduated YC’s winter 2024 cohort earlier this month with a modified idea and a new initial product. Ang told TechCrunch that they have now reached their $1 million seed funding goal, including raising a total of $1.25 million. YC’s standard contract 375,000 USD.

To recap: On that Saturday in September, Ang and his co-founder Duke Pan released a proof-of-concept, minimally reliable product version of their AI code editor on Github. They started with a chest-pounding tweet and influencer style YouTube video (founders are YouTubers).

Within hours, someone accused his project of being a copycat of another open source code editor, Continue, with very few changes. (Co-founders of PairAI even accused Doing a massive search and replace to remove Continue’s name and add theirs.) Worse, they released their product under a whimsical, fictitious license. ChatGPT. The surest way to piss off the open source community is to engage in licensing.

“We had a lot of mistakes with the licensing,” Ang told TechCrunch, insisting that the licensing has since been fixed.

Pan bold tweet Discussing how he quit his high-paying Coinbase job to do this startup and boasting that the product was “already better than Copilot” fueled the outrage. Go ahead – another YC company – involved in criticizing They, while YC CEO Garry Tan defended them.

Until Sunday, there were young founders he apologizedswitched to a standard open source license and better documented open source work supporting their work, among other benefits.

But they were also left with the open opinion that there might not be room for another code editor. “We love coding and want to see it done better,” Ang said.

So they took lemons and made lemonade that coded with artificial intelligence, using the feedback from the hate to change their product ideas. Instead of the editor itself, they are now building a “framework” that will drive AI coding tools and allow programmers to use multiple tools. On the back end, it allows tools to communicate “and actually work well together,” Ang said. The front-end will standardize the user interface so “it looks like I’m using one product instead of 10,” he said. The tool will integrate with many AI coding tools, including Continue.

While there are some public skepticsThere is also PearAI they received applause – a completely different experience than the last time it was launched.

Ang says seed round investors include Goodwater Capital, Multimodal Ventures, Orange Fund, ExitFund and some unnamed angel investors.