Reflection AI Raises $130 Million to Build Autonomous Coding Systems

Artificial intelligence (AI) startup Reflection AI emerged from stealth Friday (March 7), saying it is focused on building autonomous coding systems.

“At Reflection, we’re building superintelligent autonomous systems,” the company said in a Friday post on LinkedIn. “We believe that solving autonomous coding will enable superintelligence more broadly.”

A Friday Bloomberg article to which the post linked said that Reflection raised $130 million, including a $25 million seed funding round led by Sequoia Capital and CRV and a $105 million Series A led by Lightspeed Venture Partners and CRV.

The company was founded by two former research scientists at Alphabet’s AI unit, Google DeepMind: Misha Laskin and Ioannis Antonoglou, according to the report.

Reflection aims to build tools that are fully autonomous, rather than being co-pilots or assistants, and to develop superintelligence, which is AI that is smarter than most humans, the report said.

The company already has paying customers in financial services, technology and other sectors that have large coding teams, per the report.

Sequoia said in a Friday blog post that coding assistants already help developers increase their speed and productivity tenfold and that autonomous coding agents are the next leap forward.

“Reflection’s autonomous coding agents integrate directly into an organization’s codebase and engineering workflows, and autonomously tackle well-scoped engineering tasks entirely end-to-end,” Sequoia’s post said. “They read, write, test and deploy code, handling all the infrastructure on your behalf, relieving the burden of entire engineering workloads from developers and teams.”

CRV said in a Friday blog post that the technology Reflection is building “has the potential to redefine industries.”

“Imagine a world where engineering teams can tackle their backlogs in days instead of months, where code migrations happen seamlessly and where cyber vulnerabilities are remediated before they become critical,” CRV’s post said. “This is the world Reflection AI is building.”

Lightspeed said in a Friday blog post that Reflection AI’s approach to scaling the autonomous capabilities of large language models (LLMs) with reinforcement learning (RL) brings AI closer to superintelligence.

“Their system can plan, debug and execute complex programming tasks autonomously — a leap forward that positions Reflection AI as a major player in the future of intelligent software engineering and beyond,” the Lightspeed post said.