Augment Code sells its software factory

Harness, the software delivery company, said on Thursday that it had acquired select assets of Augment Code, including the Cosmos and Auggie CLI products, the Code Context Engine and related technology. The team behind those products will join Harness, the company said in a press release. The announcements did not disclose a price.

Augment was well funded. It came out of stealth in April 2024 with $252m in funding at a post-money valuation of $977m, TechCrunch reported at the time, with investors including Eric Schmidt, the former Google chief executive, Index Ventures, Sutter Hill Ventures, Lightspeed Venture Partners, Innovation Endeavors and Meritech Capital. Igor Ostrovsky, a former Microsoft software developer, built its first version in 2022 with Guy Gur-Ari, previously an AI research scientist at Google.

Augment's chief executive, Matt McClernan, gave the company's reasons in a blog post. "We've agreed to sell these select assets because Harness's integrated platform delivers these capabilities to customers more effectively than building them independently," he wrote. The post closed with thanks to customers, employees, investors and partners. "To our investors: your support gave us the runway to explore, iterate, and find the right home for what we built," McClernan wrote.

What is left behind is unclear. The acquisition does not appear to include the entire Augment Code company, SD Times noted. Neither Harness's announcement nor McClernan's post said what happens to the rest of it.

Harness is buying a product for a specific job. Cosmos becomes the Harness Cosmos Software Factory Agent and will automate engineering work from an idea to code ready to merge, the company said. When a requirement is written, a ticket is assigned or a bug is reported, a fleet of Cosmos agents plans the change, writes the code and tests and opens a pull request, each agent working in its own isolated virtual machine and calling in an engineer only where judgement is needed. Harness's existing agents for software delivery, security testing, runtime protection and cost management then take the change into production. Augment's Code Context Engine, which keeps a live map of a codebase, will be connected to Harness's Software Delivery Knowledge Graph.

"AI's impact on software will not be measured by how much code it generates, but by how much valuable software reaches customers," said Jyoti Bansal, Harness's founder and chief executive. He told SiliconANGLE that customers would not be forced to switch: "Our customers will get a choice. They can keep using their preferred coding tools, adopt Harness Cosmos, or use both."

"We set out to bring AI to the entire software development lifecycle, starting with context-aware coding," said Ostrovsky, Augment's co-founder and chief technology officer. "Joining Harness is the next step toward that vision."

Harness is backed by Goldman Sachs, Menlo Ventures, IVP, Unusual Ventures and Citi Ventures and counts United Airlines, Morningstar and Choice Hotels among its customers, it said. The coding tools Augment competed with are increasingly sold as part of larger bundles: Microsoft last month folded chat, coding and long-running agents into a single Copilot app. A specialist that raised a quarter of a billion dollars two and a half years ago has now placed its products inside a platform that handles what happens after the code is written.