Qodo raises $70 million for code verification as AI coding scales up

As AI coding tools generate billions of lines of code every month, a new bottleneck has emerged: ensuring software works as intended. Qodo, a startup that builds AI agents for code review, testing, and governance, is betting that verification will define the next phase of software development.

The New York-headquartered startup has raised a $70 million second funding round led by Qumra Capital, bringing its total funding to $120 million. Maor Ventures, Phoenix Venture Partners, S Ventures, Square Peg, Susa Ventures, TLV Partners, Vine Ventures, Peter Welender (OpenAI), and Clara Shih (Meta) also joined the round.

Qodo aims to serve as a layer focused on improving trust in AI-generated code as organizations accelerate adoption of tools like OpenClaw and Cloud Code. Many are discovering that faster code output does not necessarily translate into reliable or secure software.

While most AI review tools focus on what has changed, Qodo focuses on how code changes impact entire systems, taking into account regulatory standards, historical context, and risk tolerance to help companies better manage AI-generated code with more confidence.

Itamar Friedman, who previously co-founded Visualead and led Alibaba’s machine vision business (which acquired Visualead), founded Qodo in 2022. He told TechCrunch that two key moments in his career — his time at Mellanox, which was later acquired by Nvidia, and building Visualead — inspired him to start Qodo, just months before ChatGPT launched.

At Milanox, where he worked on automating device verification using machine learning, he realized that “system generation and verification systems require very different approaches (different tools, different thinking).” Later, at Alibaba’s Damo Academy, he saw AI evolving toward systems capable of reasoning in human language. By 2021-2022, just before the release of GPT-3.5, it had become clear to him that AI would generate a significant share of the world’s content — especially code — reinforcing his view that generating and verifying code would require radically different systems.

A recent survey showed that while 95% of developers do not fully trust AI-generated code, only 48% constantly review it before committing to it, highlighting the gap between awareness and practice.

“Code generation companies are largely built on MBAs,” Friedman said. “But for code quality and governance, an MBA alone is not enough.” “Quality is subjective. It depends on organizational standards, past decisions, and tribal knowledge. MBAs cannot fully understand this context. It’s like taking a great engineer from one company and asking them to review code at another company—they lack internal context.”

Companies like OpenAI and Anthropic help shape the broader narrative of AI, including adjacent fields like code review, but they largely focus on building features rather than comprehensive solutions, Friedman explained. The CEO noted that although there are other startups in this space, many of them are still at an early stage and have not yet seen widespread institutional adoption.

Qodo leans on performance to stand out in a crowded market. The startup recently ranked first in Martian’s Code Review Bench, scoring 64.3% – more than 10 points ahead of the next competitor and 25 points ahead of Claude Code Review. The standard highlights its ability to detect difficult logic errors and cross-file issues without overwhelming developers with noise.

Last month, it launched Qodo 2.0, a multi-agent code review system that now drives current standards, and introduced tools that learn each organization’s definition of code quality.

The company already works with major companies like NVIDIA, Walmart, Red Hat, Intuit, and Texas Instruments, as well as high-growth companies like Monday.com and JFrog.

“Every year had a defining moment — from Copilot to ChatGPT to full automation of tasks,” Friedman said. “We are now entering a new phase: the transition from stateless AI to stateful systems – from intelligence to ‘artificial wisdom.’ This is what Qodo was built for.