Continue Launches 1.0 with Open-Source IDE Extensions and a Hub that Empowers Developers to Build and Share Custom AI Code Assistants
$5M seed round raised from Heavybit, Y Combinator, and angels to meet developers where they are now
SAN FRANCISCO, CA, February 26, 2025 (EZ Newswire) -- Continue, the open-source AI code assistant platform, today announced the launch of Continue 1.0, a major milestone on its journey to empower developers with fully customizable AI code assistants. Continue enables developers to create, share, and use custom AI code assistants with open-source IDE extensions that can now seamlessly leverage a vibrant hub of models, context, and other building blocks. With hundreds of thousands of users, 20k+ GitHub stars, and a thriving Discord community of 10k+ developers, Continue is setting a new standard for open-source AI-enhanced development.
The release of Continue 1.0 includes a new hub that makes it frictionless to create AI code assistants with a registry for defining, managing, and sharing Continue building blocks. There are blocks published and maintained by verified partners like Claude 3.5 Sonnet from Anthropic, Codestral from Mistral, DeepSeek-R1 from Ollama, voyage-code-3 embeddings from Voyage AI, and MCP servers from Docker. Blocks and assistants may also be created and shared to the hub by individual developers, independent software vendors (ISVs), and other organizations.
Also included is the first major release of Continue's open-source extensions for VS Code and JetBrains. Developers can use these extensions with assistants and blocks from the hub via a free, solo tier. Organizations can take advantage of paid teams and enterprise tiers. Working with early enterprise users such as Siemens, Morningstar, and IONOS helped to shape the product. The hub provides engineering leaders with governance, security, and infrastructure control over AI code assistants within their organizations.
'Continue 1.0 is a huge leap forward in making AI-powered development truly customizable, private, and developer-first. The 'one-size-fits-all' AI code assistant will be a thing of the past. With this release, we're making it easier than ever for individual developers and teams to take full control over their AI coding experience through both our open-source community and our hub of building blocks for custom AI code assistants,' said Ty Dunn, co-founder of Continue.
Continue is built on the foundation of developer empowerment and data control. Unlike closed-source alternatives, Continue ensures that every developer has the power to decide how AI integrates into their coding environment. Key features of the teams and enterprise tiers on hub.continue.dev include:
Standardize development practices: Teams can establish custom AI code assistants that help developers align with shared development, review, and testing practices
Governance controls: Organizations can define and enforce policies around AI-assisted development, governing what blocks can be created, shared, and used within their teams
Private data plane deployment: Enterprises can deploy a data plane within their own infrastructure, ensuring that all code and analytics remain secure without exposing API keys or sensitive data
'Developers thrive when they have the freedom to build with the best tools available. Continue 1.0 amplifies every developer, team, and organization with the power to choose and customize AI code assistants to fit their unique workflows and preferences. This launch isn't just about AI helping developers write code—it's about making AI a natural, customizable extension of how they already work. Continue gives developers superpowers that amplify and enhance the way they already work. This is why Heavybit has been investing in developer-first startups for more than a decade,' said Jesse Robbins, General Partner at Heavybit and co-founder of Chef.
'At Mistral, our mission has always been to democratize artificial intelligence. Our partnership with Continue perfectly aligns with our vision of a developer-first ecosystem where AI code assistants are both secure and customizable. Whether you need local, on-prem, in your VPC, on the public cloud, or via serverless APIs, you can use Mistral models with Continue,' said Arthur Mensch, co-founder and CEO of Mistral AI. 'Together, we're building the future of AI-powered development on a foundation of openness and trust.'
'We believe that when it comes to AI coding tools, developers should be able to consume with confidence. In this period of rapid change, confidence requires openness, pluggability, and modularity. Now is the time to embrace the transparency and innovation of open source solutions. We believe in Continue's approach, and we're excited to partner with them and the community to define this ecosystem,' said Craig McLuckie, co-founder of Stacklok, Kubernetes, and the Cloud Native Computing Foundation
'At YC, we invest in teams that put developers first, and Continue's 1.0 launch is a perfect example of that philosophy in action,' said Garry Tan, CEO of Y Combinator. He continued 'By making it easy to create custom AI code assistants, they're giving developers the power to tailor their coding experience like never before. This is a major step forward in building an open ecosystem where innovation and democratization go hand in hand.'
Backed by Heavybit and Y Combinator, Continue has raised a total of $5 million in seed funding to create a developer ecosystem built on trust, privacy, and developer empowerment. With 1.0, Continue is not only revolutionizing the AI coding assistant landscape but also ensuring that developers everywhere have the tools they need to harness AI on their own terms.
To learn more about Continue, visit www.continue.dev. If you're interested in working at Continue, apply online.
About Continue
Continue enables developers to create, share, and use custom AI code assistants. Loved by hundreds of thousands of developers worldwide at organizations ranging from small startups to Fortune 500 companies, our open-source IDE extensions fit into existing workflows, while letting users leverage our vibrant hub of models, context, and tools. Backed by Heavybit, Y Combinator, and angels, including Julien Chaumond (co-founder of Hugging Face), Lisha Li (founder of Rosebud AI), and Florian Leibert (co-founder of Mesosphere), Continue was founded in 2023 and is based in San Francisco. For more information, visit https://www.continue.dev.
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