Kite

Kite and the Dawn of AI-Assisted Programming

Long before "AI coding assistant" was a category, software developers wrote code the arduous way: constantly context-switching to documentation, hunting through Stack Overflow, and retyping boilerplate language that millions of engineers had written before them. The collective knowledge of the world's programmers existed—but none of it was available at the moment of creation, inside the editor.

We backed Kite in 2016 because founder Adam Smith was building the first AI-powered coding copilot years before the market understood the opportunity.

Kite used machine learning trained on open-source code to deliver intelligent, context-aware code completions directly inside developers' editors—suggesting entire lines and function calls, surfacing relevant documentation, and reducing repetitive keystrokes that consume an engineer's time. Kite grew to serve hundreds of thousands of developers and helped start a product category that would become an important application of AI.

Exit Journey

Kite's engineering team and technology became a coveted asset, and Affirm acquired the company a few years later, bringing Kite's machine learning talent into a large  public company.