Ex-Google CEO Schmidt Joins Magic’s $320 Million Raise to Develop AI Coding

Magic raised $320 million from a group of investors that includes former Google CEO Eric Schmidt to build an artificial intelligence coworker for AI research and code generation, the company said in a Thursday (Aug. 29) blog post .

The investment brings the total amount the company has raised to $465 million, according to the post.

Together with Schmidt, other new investors in Magic include Jane Street , Sequoia and Atlassian , per the post.

“We believe the most promising path to safe [artificial general intelligence (AGI)] is to automate AI research and code generation to improve models and solve alignment more reliably than humans can alone,” Magic said on its website .

Magic also said in its blog post that it will build its next two supercomputers on Google Cloud .

“We are excited to partner with Google and Nvidia to build our next-gen AI supercomputer on Google Cloud,” Magic CEO and co-founder Eric Steinberger said in the post. “Nvidia’s GB200 NLV72 system will greatly improve inference and training efficiency for our models, and Google Cloud offers us the fastest timeline to scale, and a rich ecosystem of cloud services.”

In February 2023, Magic raised $23 million in a Series A funding round, saying in a blog post that the funding would “accelerate our journey to build a true AI colleague for software engineering.”

“While today’s code completion tools are already proving to be immensely useful, we can’t wait to see what people build with magic,” the company said in the Feb. 6, 2023, post.

It was reported Aug. 23 that generative AI has quickly proven its value in powering coding assistants .

One AI coding assistant, Microsoft -owned GitHub Copilot , has drawn nearly 2 million paying subscribers since its launch in 2022 and contributed to a 45% year-over-year increase in GitHub ’s revenue.

Amazon , Meta and Google have also built AI assistants for writing and editing code, and several startups in this field raised a total of $906 million since January 2023, including $433 million so far in 2024.

AI-powered assistants offer developers a powerful new toolkit to brainstorm ideas, write and refine code, and fix bugs, PYMNTS reported in May.

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