Exclusive: After causing outrage on Day 1 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 sign — the founders of PearAI got “canceled,” as founder Nang Ang described it to TechCrunch, receiving an outpouring of online hate.

But they survived and graduated the YC’s winter 2024 cohort earlier this month with a modified idea and a new initial product. Now they’ve also made their goal of $1 million in seed funding, Ang tells TechCrunch, raising a total of $1.25 million, including YC’s standard deal of $375,000.

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

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

“We definitely did have a lot of mistakes with licensing,” Ang told TechCrunch, insisting that licensing has since been fixed.

Pan’s bravado tweet discussing how he quit his high-paying Coinbase job to do this startup and boasting that the product was “already better than Copilot” further fanned the outrage. Continue — another YC company — got involved to criticize them, while YC CEO Garry Tan defended them. 

By Sunday, the young founders hadapologized, moved to a standard open source license, and better documented the open source work that underpinned theirs, among other concessions.

But they were also left with the obvious feedback that there may not be room for yet another code editor. “We love coding, and we want to see it be done better,” Ang said. 

So they took lemons and made AI coding lemonade, using the feedback in the hate to modify their product idea. Instead of an editor itself, they are now building a “framework” that will curate AI coding tools, allowing programmers to use multiple tools. In the back end, it allows the tools to communicate “and actually work well together,” Ang said. The front end will standardize the user interface so that it “seems like I’m using one product instead of 10,” he said. The tool will integrate with many AI coding tools, including Continue.

While there are some public skeptics, PearAI has also gotten kudos — a starkly different experience to the last time it launched. 

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