Harjot Gill was running FluxNinja, an observability startup he co-founded several years after selling his first startup Netsil to Nutanix in 2018, when he noticed a curious trend.
“We had a team of remote engineers who were starting to adopt AI code generation on GitHub Copilot,” Gill told TechCrunch. “We saw that adoption happen, and it was very clear to me that as a second-order effect, it’s going to cause bottlenecks in the code review.”
In early 2023, Gill started CodeRabbit, an AI-powered code review platform, and it acquired FlexNinja.
Gill’s prediction has come true: developers are now regularly using AI coding assistants to generate code, but the output is often buggy, forcing engineers to spend a lot of time on corrections.
CodeRabbit can help catch some of the errors. The business has been growing 20% a month and is now making more than $15 million in annual recurring revenue (ARR), according to Gill.
Investors find the startup’s growth exciting. On Tuesday, CodeRabbit announced that it raised a $60 million Series B, valuing the company at $550 million. The round, which brought the startup’s total funding to $88 million, was led by Scale Venture Partners with participation of NVentures, Nvidia’s venture capital arm, and returning investors including CRV.
CodeRabbit is helping companies like Chegg, Groupon, and Mercury, along with over 8,000 other businesses, save time on the famously frustrating task of code review, which has become even more time-consuming with the rise of AI-generated code.
Since CodeRabbit understands a company’s codebase, it can identify bugs and provide feedback, acting like a coworker, Gill said. He added that companies using CodeRabbit can cut the number of humans working on code-review by half.
As with most areas of AI, CodeRabbit has competition. Startup rivals include Graphite, which secured a $52 million Series B led by Accel earlier this year, and Greptile, which we reported is in talks for a $30 million Series A round with Benchmark.
While leading AI coding assistants like Anthropic’s Claude Code and Cursor also offer AI-powered code review capabilities, Gill is betting that customers will prefer a standalone offering in the long term. “CodeRabbit is a lot more comprehensive in terms of depth and technical breadth than bundled solutions,” he said.
Whether his prediction will turn out to be correct remains to be seen. But for now, thousands of developers are clearly happy to pay CodeRabbit $30 a month.
Even with the growing popularity of AI code review tools like CodeRabbit, AI solutions still can’t yet be fully trusted to fix the bugs and “unusable” code written by AI. The unreliability of AI-generated code has given rise to a new corporate role: the vibe code cleanup specialist.