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.
SOURCE: Continue
Hashtags
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
TechCrunch
an hour ago
- TechCrunch
Tesla sues former Optimus engineer over alleged trade secret theft
Tesla sued a former engineer for allegedly stealing trade secrets from its humanoid robotics program, Optimus, and using them to launch a rival startup. The lawsuit, which was filed on Wednesday and originally reported on by Bloomberg, accuses Zhongjie 'Jay' Li of stealing trade secrets regarding Tesla's development of 'advanced robotic hand sensors' to launch his startup Proception, a Y Combinator-backed company building robotic hands. The complaint states that Li, who worked at Tesla from August 2022 to September 2024, downloaded confidential information about Optimus on two separate personal smartphones. The complaint also added that during the last few months of his time at Tesla, Li researched 'humanoid robotic hands' on his workplace computer in addition to making internet searches regarding venture capital and other startup funding sources. 'Less than a week after he left Tesla, Proception was incorporated,' the complaint stated. 'And within just five months, Proception publicly claimed to have 'successfully built' advanced humanoid robotic hands—-hands that bear a striking resemblance to the designs Li worked on at Tesla.' Proception's website states the company is working to 'revolutionize human-robot interaction by building the world's most advanced humanoid hands.' TechCrunch reached out to Proception and Tesla for more information. Techcrunch event Save $200+ on your TechCrunch All Stage pass Build smarter. Scale faster. Connect deeper. Join visionaries from Precursor Ventures, NEA, Index Ventures, Underscore VC, and beyond for a day packed with strategies, workshops, and meaningful connections. Save $200+ on your TechCrunch All Stage pass Build smarter. Scale faster. Connect deeper. Join visionaries from Precursor Ventures, NEA, Index Ventures, Underscore VC, and beyond for a day packed with strategies, workshops, and meaningful connections. Boston, MA | REGISTER NOW Tesla's Optimus robotics program has been on a bit of a rocky path since the company unveiled it was building a humanoid robot, Tesla Bot, in 2021. In 2022, the company said that the bot, alongside other new products, would be introduced in 2023. But Optimus has remained in development. In July 2024, Tesla's Elon Musk said that the company would begin selling the robot in 2026. Just a few months later at Tesla's 'We, Robot' event in October 2024, Tesla's Optimus bots in attendance were largely controlled by humans offsite.
Axios
4 hours ago
- Axios
Exclusive: Sorcerer raises $3.9M for weather balloons
Sorcerer, a Y Combinator weather balloon startup, has raised a $3.9 million seed round, the company tells Axios exclusively. Why it matters: Better weather data could help companies and governments navigate risk and extreme weather, but current methods are lacking. Zoom in: FCVC led the round, and was joined by Y Combinator, Collab Fund, Transpose Platform, Pioneer Fund, New Legacy and First Order Fund. Angels in the round included Kulveer Taggar and Taro Fukuyama. Sorcerer co-founder and CEO Austin Tindle says the funds will be used to increase the number of balloons to meet the demand of early customers and partners in sectors like weather services, aviation and aerospace. Tindle says Sorcerer is working with the U.S. National Weather Service and the government of El Salvador. How it works: The company has developed a small, super-pressure balloon that can constantly change its altitude between the stratosphere and the surface. The balloons carry sensors, a solar panel and a satellite connection, and collect data about the temperature, wind speed, wind direction, atmospheric pressure and humidity. Other companies have developed similar weather balloons, but Tindle says Sorcerers are significantly smaller and lighter because they only need solar power to change altitude and don't carry a consumable like ballast. Sorcerer says its balloons can last in the skies for months at a time, longer than other weather balloons. The intrigue: Sorcerer is also using its weather data to develop weather AI models that is says can deliver more accurate and higher quality forecasts Catch up quick: The company went through the Y Combinator program in the summer of 2024. The big picture: Many areas of the world outside of the U.S. and Europe lack adequate weather data. Weather data can be crucial to governments to plan for extreme weather events, and key to companies like utilities, insurance firms, and farmers. Better weather forecasting will be increasingly important as weather becomes more extreme with climate change. Follow the money: AI weather prediction is a hot sector, with deep-pocketed players like Nvidia and Google involved in the technology.
Business Insider
a day ago
- Business Insider
The 10 most exciting AI agent startups at Y Combinator's Demo Day for its first-ever spring cohort
Christmas came early for Y Combinator. The storied Silicon Valley accelerator had AI agents startups at the top of their wish list — and the startup community delivered. When Y Combinator issued a callout earlier this year for more founders building so-called "agentic" AI — software that can essentially think and perform tasks on its own — entrepreneurs were all ears. Of the 144 companies in YC's spring 2025 batch, 70 build agents, according to the accelerator's startup directory. Many of the spring batch startups showed off their technology at YC's Demo Day on Wednesday. Each batch brings together a few hundred early-stage startups for a three-month sprint of product development and mentorship in San Francisco. Tens of thousands apply, and only a fraction make the cut. YC invests $500,000 in every company it selects, and its alumni roster includes success stories such as Stripe, Airbnb, DoorDash, Coinbase, and Instacart. 2025 marks the first time YC has run a spring cohort, which ran from April to June. For its inaugural spring batch, YC partners said they were especially keen on startups exploring new and creative ways to harness artificial intelligence. Many of the startups that made the cut apply agentic AI across industries — from cybersecurity to consumer fintech to healthcare. BI dug through YC's Spring 2025 cohort to find 10 AI agent startups revolutionizing their respective industries. To represent the spread of startups in the overall cohort, we picked a handful of the many startups YC categorized as B2B, two healthcare startups, and one each of fintech, consumer, and industrials. From technology that teaches old robots new tricks, to agents that help consumers apply for the best mortgage, here are some of the most exciting agentic startups in YC's inaugural spring batch.
