Startup Magic, which competes with GitHub, raised $ 23 million

Magic, the San Francisco-based code-generating platform, has just concluded its Series A fundraising round, pocketing $23 million. The fundraising round was led by Alphabet’s CapitalG with participation from Elad Gil, Nat Friedman and Amplify Partners.

The problem for GitHub lies in the fact that Magic’s code-generating product closely resembles GitHub’s own Copilot – an AI pair programmer that suggests code in your editor. Magic was founded by Eric Steinberger and Sebastian De Ro with the aspiration to develop an AI-driven tool designed to help software engineers write, review, debug and plan code changes.

The purpose of Magic is to decrease the amount of time and resources necessary to develop software. Similarly to Magic, GitHub’s Copilot is trained on public code to suggest additional lines of code in response to a description of what a developer wants to accomplish.

Asked about the competitive edge over Copilot, the co-founder of Magic, Steinberg, responded by saying that the advantage lies in new neural network architecture that, in comparison to other similar products in the market, can read 100x more lines of code. However, at the moment we can only trust verbal claims because thus far the company has not launched a demo product yet.