Filed under Dev Tool · 2022
Kite
2014 - 2022, 9 years old
A Python-focused AI code completion plugin that predated GitHub Copilot by years.
Kite spent eight years and roughly $17 million building an AI assistant for Python developers, attracting around 500,000 monthly active users with almost no marketing. The company never solved monetization. In a farewell post, founder Adam Smith concluded that individual developers do not pay for tools and that the underlying models could not understand non-local code context well enough to deliver a true 10x improvement. The team open-sourced the codebase under BSD-3 and shut the product down in November 2022, less than five months after GitHub Copilot left preview.
- Founded
- 2014-01
- Shut down
- 2022-11-16
- Funding raised
- $17M
- Years alive
- 9
- Founders
- Adam Smith