Kite, the AI-powered code completion tool secures $17M in funding and goes cloudless for better latency, security and privacy

Kite is a python based, AI-powered code completion tool which helps developers avoid repetitive work like copying and pasting or fixing simple errors. Recently, they secured a new $10 million round of funding led by Dan Scholnick from Trinity Ventures. This takes Kite to $17 million in total funding. The CEOs of GitHub, Dropbox, and Twitch also joined Trinity Ventures in this funding.

Kite is only available locally

Kite is going completely cloudless. It will now perform all processing locally on users’ computers, instead of in the cloud. Users don’t even have to sign up for a Kite account

The decision to go cloudless was based on two major reasons.

• First, it hampered the latency. It was impossible to provide low-latency completions when the intelligence lived in the cloud. Running locally, Kite works extremely fast regardless of the internet connection.
• Security and privacy are major concerns when working on the cloud. Users are often uncomfortable with code leaving their computer and worried about data breaches. Going local allowed them to keep their codebases on their own computers.

Kite has also optimized its Python analysis engine and AI models to work with the resource constraints of users’ computers.

For existing Kite users, Kite has been auto-updated to work locally. If a user has previously uploaded code to their servers, they can remove data via Kite’s web portal.

Line-of-Code completions

Apart from this new funding and local computation, Kite also comes with Line-of-Code completions which make Kite predict several “words” of code at a time. The AI software generally predicts the next several code elements a user is likely to type. At times, it can also predict full lines of code.

Some developers also wanted Kite to support Linux and other programming languages. However, the team at Kite has clarified that it is not yet available. “It’s taken us longer to work on these than we originally hoped. Because we’re a small team of about 15 people, we decided (with real regret) that it didn’t make sense to expand our addressable market when our core product still needed work.” reads their blog post.

Kite is also updating its privacy policy. Here’s a snapshot from Hacker News.

“We collect a variety of usage analytics that helps us understand how you use Kite and how we can improve the product. These include:

• Which editors you are using Kite with
• Number of requests that the Kite Engine has handled for you
• How often you use specific Kite features e.g. how many completions from Kite did you use
• Size (in number of files) of codebases that you work with
• Names of 3rd party Python packages that you use
• Kite application resource usage (CPU and RAM)

You can opt-out of sending this analytics by changing a Kite setting (https://help.kite.com/article/79-opting-out-of-usage-metrics).

Additionally, we collect anonymized “heartbeats” that are used to make sure the Kite app is functioning properly and not crashing unexpectedly. These analytics are just simple pings with no metadata, and as mentioned, they’re anonymized so that there’s no way for us to trace which users they came from.

We also use third party libraries (Rollbar and Crashlytics) to report errors or bugs that occur during the usage of the product.

What we don’t collect

• Contents (partial or full) of any source code file that resides on your hard drive
• Information (i.e. file paths) about your file system hierarchy
• Any indices of your code produced by the Kite Engine to power our features – these all stay local to your hard drive”

Read the full information on Kite’s blog.

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