Coding & software agents · San Francisco, US · founded 2023
Poolside: who founded it, who funds it
Poolside is a San Francisco AI coding lab founded in 2023 by Jason Warner and Eiso Kant, who came from GitHub and Athenian. What it is building: code-specialised foundation models trained with RL from code execution; open-weight Laguna models; the Model Factory training stack. It has raised $1B in disclosed rounds, most recently a Licence + investment of $1B at a $12B valuation in August 2026, led by Nvidia. It has licensed its technology to a larger company.
- Founders
- Jason Warner (ex-GitHub), Eiso Kant (ex-Athenian)
- Founders from
- ex-GitHub, ex-Athenian
- Location
- San Francisco, US (North America)
- Valuation
- $12B set by the last priced round
- Raised
- $1B disclosed
- Investors
- Nvidia lead
- What ships
- Open-weight Laguna coding models.
Rounds
| Date | Round | Amount | Valuation | Lead | Source |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Aug 20, 2026 | Licence + investmentNvidia pays $6B for a non-exclusive licence to Model Factory, hires 109 staff and invests $1B at $12B pre-money; not an acquisition | $1B | $12B | Nvidia | saastr.com |
Sources
- Poolside poolside.ai
News
-
Sep 9, 2026
+1 more coverage
- Yahoo Finance Nvidia's $6 Billion Deal for Poolside's Model Factory Is a Wager on Open-Source Models Dr…
- Aug 24, 2026
- Aug 21, 2026
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Jul 22, 2026
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Jul 8, 2026
- Jun 19, 2026
- Apr 29, 2026
Investors who back other labs here
- Nvidia also: Safe Superintelligence, Reflection AI, Skild AI, Thinking Machines Lab