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Zencoder announced today the acquisition of Machinet, a developer of context-aware AI coding assistants with more than 100,000 downloads in the JetBrains ecosystem. The acquisition strengthens Zencoder’s position in the competitive AI coding assistant landscape and expands its reach among Java developers and other users of JetBrains’ popular development environments.
The deal represents a strategic expansion for Zencoder, which emerged from stealth mode just six months ago but has quickly established itself as a serious competitor to GitHub Copilot and other AI coding tools.
“At this point, there are three strong coordination products in the market that are production grade: it’s us, Cursor, and Windsurf. For smaller companies, it’s becoming harder and harder to compete,” said Andrew Filev, CEO and founder of Zencoder, in an exclusive interview with VentureBeat about the acquisition. “Our technical staff includes more than 50 engineers. For some startups, it’s very hard to keep that pace.”
The great AI coding assistant shakeout: Why small players can’t compete
This acquisition comes at a pivotal moment in the AI coding assistant market. Just last week, reports emerged that OpenAI is in discussions to acquire Windsurf, another AI coding assistant, for approximately $3 billion. While Filev maintains the timing is coincidental, he acknowledges that it reflects broader market dynamics.
“I think there’s going to be more to it, and I’m looking forward to it,” Filev said. “It’s a huge product surface. You have to support multiple IDEs, you have to integrate with multiple DevOps tools, you have to support different parts of software life cycle. There are 70-plus, 100-plus programming languages… There’s so much work there that it’s very, very hard for the smaller companies that only have like sub-10 engineers to compete in the long term.”
How Zencoder’s JetBrains strategy outflanks Microsoft-dependent rivals
One of the key strategic values of acquiring Machinet is its strong presence in the JetBrains ecosystem, which is particularly popular among Java developers and enterprise backend teams.
“JetBrains audiences are millions of engineers. They’re one of the leading providers for certain programming languages and technologies. They’re particularly well known in the Java world, which is a big chunk of enterprise backend,” Filev explained.
This gives Zencoder an advantage over competitors …