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

On the first day of the winter session of Y Combinator 2024 – just after being photographed in front of the YC sign – the founders of PearAI “were eliminated,” as founder Nang Ang explained to TechCrunch, receiving an outpouring of hate online.

But he survived and finished the YC winter 2024 team earlier this month with a revised concept and a new product to start with. Now they’ve raised their $1 million goal in seed funding, Ang tells TechCrunch, raising a total of $1.25 million, plus The price of shares YC and $375,000.

To recap: That same Saturday in September, Ang and his co-founder, Duke Pan, released a proof-of-concept, limited-edition version of their AI editor on GitHub. They started with a chest shaking tweet and influencer style YouTube video (founders are YouTubers).

Within hours, someone accused their project of being a copy of another open source editor, Continue, with minor changes. (The founders of PairAI were even the accused (by doing extensive research and editing to remove the name Continue and add theirs.) Worse, they released their product under an interesting license, written by ChatGPT. The surest way to deal with the open source community is to compromise licenses.

“We had a lot of mistakes in getting the license,” Ang told TechCrunch, insisting that the license has been established.

Pan’s bravado tweet discussing how he quit his high-paying job at Coinbase to do this and boasting that the product was “already better than Copilot” also fueled outrage. Go ahead – another YC company – joined the opposition them, while YC CEO Garry Tan he protected them.

By Sunday, the young founders were he apologizedthey moved to a popular open source license, successfully documenting the open source project that was dropped, among other approvals.

But he was also left with the obvious feeling that there might not be room for another editor. “We love copying, and we want to see it done right,” Ang said.

So they took lemons and made AI coding lemonade, using the answers in the hate to change their mind. Instead of the editor itself, they are now creating a “signature” that will control AI writing tools, allowing programmers to use multiple tools. At the back end, they allow devices to communicate “and actually work better together,” Ang said. The front end will set up the user interface so that “it looks like I’m using one thing instead of 10,” he said. The tool will integrate with many AI writing tools, including Continue.

While there are other people doubtersPearAI too he received honor – a very different experience than the last time it was installed.

Seed investors in the round include Goodwater Capital, Multimodal Ventures, Orange Fund, Exitfund, and other unnamed angel investors, Ang says.