Poolside AI targets Israel’s defense sector

US unicorn Poolside AI, which has developed an autonomous software development engine that competes with giants such as Gemini, Cloud and Cursor, has entered Israel for the first time. The aims is to hire Israeli engineers and sell its software to the defense sector, “Globes” has learned. The company believes that after having already signed contracts with US defense giants like Raytheon and the US Department of Defense, they will now be able to approach Israeli defense companies and the defense sector, which currently rely on internal solutions or products from other AI companies.

Poolside has hired a senior executive from the chip industry, Tzachi Cohen, formerly of AMD and Habana Labs, to head the inference department and is now recruiting a number of development engineers, with an emphasis on AI experts, as a first step. Poolside is in the midst of a $2 billion funding round led by Nvidia, at a valuation of $14 billion, and has attracted the attention of top investors, along with the venture capital arms of Citi and Schroders. The company seeks AI experts in Israel specializing in optimizing code on GPUs, along with software developers for teams focused on model training, inference and user interfaces.

Headquartered in Paris, working from home

Poolside was cofounded by Jason Warner, one of the developers of GitHub and Microsoft’s Copilot AI engine, and in collaboration with Dutch expert Elso Kant. The company was founded on a work-from-home model, with employees in the US, France, the UK, and more. Unlike companies like OpenAI, which are centered around San Francisco, Poolside claims that the talent is not concentrated in one location. The company’s headquarters are in Paris, and about 150 employees are invited there once a month for a concentrated work week, which includes team meetings and time spent together. However, the company is careful to hire only employees from the West, mainly US allies, and does not employ anyone from China, to ensure maximum data security for its security clients.

Ambitious mission

Poolside distinguishes itself from other AI companies with an ambitious mission: building large language models dedicated to developing software code, along with a final product that includes complex user interfaces. In doing so, it competes simultaneously in two sectors: language model companies such as OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google on the one hand, and on the other, companies that use existing models and integrate them into an autonomous development product, such as Cognition’s Corsair, Windsurf, and GitHub’s Copilot.

Poolside’s choice to operate independently in the market and train large language models itself has brought heavy costs. The company is required to build its own data center in Texas, and in the first phase purchase 41,000 graphics processors of the newest type, Blackwell Ultra – a number that could grow to about 100,000 in the long term. The data center will initially operate at a capacity of 256 megawatts, and is then planned to expand to 2 megawatts.

Industry insiders say that Poolside executives claim an advantage over OpenAI and Anthropic in that the company trains its models to act as software development assistants in advance, rather than building a general language model, from which specific activity is derived. Accordingly, companies that have developed autonomous development engines also use general models developed by AI giants. For comparison: Cursor uses GPT models from OpenAI, Anthropic’s Cloud and Google’s Gemini.

Superhuman intelligence

Poolside presents its vision for the security and public sectors, with an emphasis on developing artificial general intelligence (AGI) – intelligence with superhuman capabilities, surpassing human capabilities. The company focuses on what it calls the Model Factory, an industrialized training infrastructure that runs hundreds of millions of code runs every month, allowing the system to learn from the results. CEO Jason Warner estimates that human-level AI capabilities in knowledge work will arrive within 18 months to three years.

The choice to start with a software development product is designed to create differentiation among companies interested in adopting original language models developed securely in-house, in response to concerns among public and defense companies about using OpenAI or Anthropic models due to data security and privacy issues.

In the first quarter of 2025, Poolside signed a contract with Raytheon (RTX), which employs 60,000 programmers, and implemented the company’s system in eight software environments, including Amazon, private cloud environments and classified workstations. Among the investors is the CIA’s venture capital arm, In-Q-Tel.

Published by Globes, Israel business news – en.globes.co.il – on December 15, 2025.

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