The $23 million Series A led by Alphabet’s CapitalG includes prominent investors Nat Friedman (former CEO of Github and co-creator of Copilot), Elad Gil, and Amplify Partners, bringing the company’s total funding to $28 million.

Magic.dev, a new startup that is developing an AI-powered software engineer, announced a $23 million Series A led by Alphabet’s independent growth fund, CapitalG, with participation from prominent investors Nat Friedman, Elad Gil, and Amplify Partners. This brings the company’s total funding to $28 million.

Magic is developing an “AI colleague” for software engineering. Like a human engineer, it aims to communicate in natural language and collaborate with users on complex code changes. Powered by large language models, the product operates like an AI pair programmer able to understand and continually learn more about the context of the work and the user.

Magic co-founder and CEO Eric Steinberger said, “Our mission is to deploy AI to accelerate science and make the world more productive. For decades, technology was just a tool; soon it will be a colleague. The adoption of ‘AI assistants’ in the workplace will be as impactful as the industrial revolution, and it’s important to get this transition right.” He added, “I’m excited to be applying our technology to the field of software engineering; it’s highly complex, collaborative, and a bottleneck for many organizations. Due to what remains a tight technical talent market, many organizations are unable to hire the engineers they need. Magic will enable people and organizations to build game-changing technology faster and more easily than has ever been possible before.”

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Before founding Magic in 2022, Steinberger founded ClimateScience.org in order to make climate change education accessible to children worldwide, worked as an ML researcher at FAIR, and studied computer science at the University of Cambridge.

“I’ve been evaluating enterprise applications for AI for the past three years,” said CapitalG partner Jill Chase who led the investment and will be joining Magic’s board. “Code generation is an obvious application for AI, given the magnitude of the software development market and the clear ROI associated with productivity gains. It’s a space where the best technology will win because the open ecosystem allows for easy distribution of the best product. Magic is highly differentiated from other code generation start-ups because it’s on a path to go far beyond simple code completion; it’s building a true AI colleague. This has the potential to fundamentally change software development.”

Elad Gil, serial entrepreneur and investor, said, “Eric and his team have a strong vision for AI’s potential in the field of code generation. I’m excited to back Magic in this exciting space.”

Mike Dauber, general partner at Amplify Partners, added, “Despite all of the attention given to Generative AI, we were surprised and impressed by how much better Magic was than anything else that we’d seen. Magic has the potential to grow into a truly generational business.”

Over the last few years the high cost of software developer talent (on average about $150K+ per year) and the scarcity of that talent (IDC predicts a shortfall of 4 million engineers by 2025) have fostered interest in developer productivity tooling. IDC estimates there to be 25 million developers worldwide and predicts that number to grow to 40 million by 2027. Magic’s technology will help software developers scale their impact and build better products faster.

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