On the first day of Y Combinator’s 2024 winter session (pictured right after orientation and in front of the YC sign), PearAI’s founder was “cancelled” amid a barrage of hate online, as founder Nang Ang explained to TechCrunch.
But they survived with revised ideas and new initial products, and graduated from YC’s Winter 2024 cohort earlier this month. Now they’ve met their goal of $1 million in seed funding, and have raised a total of $1.25 million, including $375,000, a standard deal for YC, they told TechCrunch.
To recap, on that Saturday in September, Ang and his co-founder Duke Pan released a proof-of-concept, minimum viable product version of their AI code editor on GitHub. It started with heart-pounding tweets and influencer-style YouTube videos (the founder is a YouTuber).
Within hours, someone accused his project of being basically a copy of Continue, another open source code editor, with very little changes. (The PairAI founders were even accused of conducting a mass search and replace to remove Continue’s name and add their own.) Worse than that, they released their product with a funky, made-up license written in ChatGPT. The surest way to upset the open source community is to screw up the licensing issue.
“We made a lot of mistakes with licensing,” Ang told TechCrunch, insisting that the licensing has been fixed.
Pan’s bravado, in which he discussed how he quit his high-paying job at Coinbase to start the startup and boasted that the product was “already better than Copilot,” further fueled the outrage. To be continued — Another YC company — participated in the criticism YC CEO Garry Tan defended them.
By Sunday, the young founders had apologized, switched to a standard open source license, and better documented their underlying open source work, among other concessions.
But they also got clear feedback that there might not be room for another code editor. “We love coding and we want to see it done better,” Ang said.
So they took the lemons and made AI coding lemonade, using feedback from their haters to refine their product idea. Instead of an editor itself, we are now curating AI coding tools to build a “framework” that allows programmers to use multiple tools. The backend allows the tools to “actually work well together,” Ang said. The front end will standardize the user interface “so it looks like you’re using one product rather than 10,” he said. This tool integrates with many AI coding tools, including Continue.
Despite some public skepticism, PearAI has been hailed as a completely different experience from its last launch.
Seed round investors include Goodwater Capital, Multimodal Ventures, Orange Fund, Exitfund and some anonymous angel investors, Ang says.
