After causing outrage on the first day of Y Combinator, AI code editor PearAI lands $1M seed

On the first day of Y Combinator's Winter 2024 session – right after orientation and a photo in front of the YC panel – PearAI's founders were “canceled”, as founder Nang Ang described it to TechCrunch: receive a wave of hatred online.

But they survived and graduated from YC's Winter 2024 cohort earlier this month with a modified idea and an initial new product. Now, they've also reached their $1 million seed funding goal, Ang tells TechCrunch, raising a total of $1.25 million, including The Standard YC Chord of $375,000.

To recap: that Saturday in September, Ang and his co-founder Duke Pan released a proof-of-concept and minimal viable version of their AI code editor on Github. They launched a powerful tweet and an influencer-style YouTube video (the founders are YouTubers).

Within hours, someone accused their project of essentially being a copy of another open source code editor, Continue, with very few changes. (The founders of PairAI were same accused to do a mass search and replace to remove Continue's name and add their own.) Worse than that, they released their product under a genius, made-up license written with ChatGPT. The surest way to piss off the open source community is to mess with licensing.

“We definitely made a lot of mistakes with the licensing,” Ang told TechCrunch, insisting that the licensing has since been corrected.

Bang bravado tweet discussing how he left his high-paying job at Coinbase to start this startup and boasting that the product was “already better than Copilot” further stoked the outrage. Continue – another YC company – got involved to criticize them, while YC CEO Garry Tan defended them.

On Sunday, the young founders had apologizedmoved to a standard open source license and better documented the open source work behind theirs, among other concessions.

But they also had a clear feeling that there might not be room for yet another code editor. “We love coding and we want it to be done better,” Ang said.

So they took lemons and created AI-coding lemonade, using the hateful comments to modify their product idea. Instead of an editor itself, they are now building a “framework” that will organize the AI's coding tools, allowing programmers to use multiple tools. In the backend, this allows the tools to communicate “and work well together,” Ang said. The front-end will standardize the user interface so that it “looks like I’m using one product instead of 10,” he said. The tool will integrate with many AI coding tools, including Continue.

Although there is an audience the skepticsPearAI also has I received congratulations – a radically different experience than its last launch.

Investors in the seed round include Goodwater Capital, Multimodal Ventures, Orange Fund, ExitFund and some unnamed angel investors, Ang says.