The Israeli startup that preceded Claude Code and Cursor has been sold
The Israeli company Tabnine, a pioneer in AI-powered code completion tools, has been acquired by the American corporation Tricentis. The startup will continue to develop its product under the new ownership.
Source: Tabnine
Long before everyone was talking about Cursor and Claude Code, the Israeli company Tabnine developed an AI tool that knew how to complete code directly in your IDE. However, the competition against giants with deep pockets took its toll, and now the Israeli startup has been acquired by an American company, and will continue to develop the product under it.
They were there before everyone else, and will continue to build
The Israeli company Tabnine, which developed an AI-based code completion system, is being acquired by the American company Tricentis, and will continue to develop its product under it. Tabnine's system integrates directly into your IDE and performs AutoComplete for code. When you write code as usual, and the system recognizes that it can complete the action based on your previous work and other projects, it offers completion at the click of a button. The company explained that its AI tool is based on powerful models and provides relevant, customized, and above all, contextual code suggestions for the project. Back in 2023, the company added a chat feature that allowed for creating code from scratch based on prompts — similar to what tools like Cursor and Claude Code do today. Such tools were also strong competitors to Tabnine and, of course, had significantly deeper pockets compared to the Israeli startup.
As part of the acquisition by Tricentis, most of the existing team — about 30 product and development personnel out of about 50 employees who were at the company before the acquisition — will continue to develop the product. The acquisition amount was not disclosed, but the startup, founded by Dror Weiss and Eran Yahav, raised 67 million dollars throughout its life from venture capital funds and investors (according to Pitchbook data), including the Khosla fund, Samsung Next, and Qualcomm. The company's last funding round took place in 2023, when it raised 25 million dollars. In those days, the main competition was against GitHub Copilot, but since then, significant competitors like Cursor, Claude Code, and OpenAI's Codex have joined the race. Last year, the company laid off about 15 employees.
