Eiso Kant

Eiso Kant is a Dutch software entrepreneur and technology executive. He is the co-founder and chief technology officer of poolside, the 2023 San Francisco artificial-intelligence company building foundation models for software engineering with Jason Warner as chief executive officer. He was previously the chief executive officer and founder of Athenian from 2019 through 2023, the co-founder and chief executive officer of source{d} from 2015 through 2019, and the co-founder of online-recruitment platform Tyba from 2011 through 2016.

At a glance

• Education: Bachelor in business administration, IE University, Madrid, Spain.
• Current role: Co-founder and chief technology officer of poolside, since May 2023.
• Key contributions: Co-founder and chief technology officer of poolside with Jason Warner since 2023; founder and chief executive officer of Athenian, acquired by The Linux Foundation in November 2023; co-founder and chief executive of source{d} from 2015 to 2019, applying machine learning to source code from a Madrid base; co-founder of online-recruitment platform Tyba, acquired by Graduateland in April 2016; founder of Twollars, the first Twitter-based virtual-currency platform, in 2009.
• X / Twitter: @eisokant
• LinkedIn: eisokant
• GitHub: eiso
• YouTube: Eiso Kant

Origins

Kant is Dutch and was raised in the Netherlands. He attended international schools from age 10 and began programming at age 12. At age 15 he built his first internet venture, PrimaPrints, an e-commerce site for classic lithography prints that he describes as a six-month exercise in learning web design and programming.

In 2009 Kant co-founded Twollars with telecom analyst Mac Taylor, the first virtual-currency platform on Twitter. The platform allowed users to send Twollars to charities through tweets, with one Twollar redeemable at a ten-to-one rate against the U.S. dollar by anyone willing to buy them on behalf of a charity. The project signed more than 300 charities including Livestrong and the Red Cross across more than 30 countries and attracted coverage in The Guardian, Businessweek, and Phys.org.

In 2009 Kant relocated to Spain to attend IE University in Madrid, where he completed a bachelor in business administration. The relocation anchored a long European base that ran through Madrid, Berlin, and Paris before his current residence in Portugal.

Career

In 2011, while studying at IE University, Kant co-founded Tyba with classmates Jorge Schnura and Philip von Have. The platform connected junior technology talent with European startup employers. By 2014 the Madrid-based team had grown to approximately 30 people across more than a dozen nationalities, working with more than 800 technology startups across 14 countries, and the company had raised more than four million euros from international investors at an approximate 13.5 million-euro valuation. In April 2016 Graduateland, the Copenhagen-based career-platform operator, acquired Tyba.

In March 2015 Kant co-founded source{d} in Madrid with the same Tyba partners. The company was an early entrant in applying machine learning to source code, building open-source infrastructure for analysing software repositories at scale. source{d} raised an approximately six-million-dollar round in October 2016 with Xavier Niel, Otium Venture, and Sunstone Capital participating, and continued through Series B-stage capital. The company shipped a July 2019 enterprise edition of its software-development-analytics platform before winding down operations by 2019 to 2020. Kant served as chief executive officer throughout, with the src-d GitHub organization preserving the open-source artifacts.

In December 2019 Kant founded Athenian, an engineering-analytics platform that provided cycle-time, pull-request, and engineering-process metrics without focusing on individual-engineer-level evaluation, a deliberate departure from the per-developer framing common in the category. The March 2022 TechCrunch profile details the platform positioning. Athenian was acquired by The Linux Foundation in November 2023, six months after Kant transitioned to the poolside chief-technology-officer role.

In May 2023 Kant co-founded poolside with Jason Warner, the former chief technology officer of GitHub. The pair had developed the thesis through the Developing Leadership podcast they have co-hosted since 2020. The founding premise was that foundation models specifically optimized for software engineering, trained through what poolside calls Reinforcement Learning from Code Execution Feedback (RLCEF), could surpass general-purpose frontier models on coding work. Kant has anchored the technical and research-and-development effort, with the long source-code-analysis record at source{d} and the engineering-process record at Athenian providing the data and process foundations.

The fundraising sequence is documented on the poolside profile and runs from the May 2023 $26 million seed through the August 2023 $126 million seed extension to the October 2024 $500 million Series B at a $3 billion post-money valuation, totaling approximately $626 million. The October 2025 Project Horizon announcement of a 2-gigawatt Pecos County, Texas datacenter campus with CoreWeave as anchor tenant coincided with a $2 billion Series C raise at a $12 billion pre-money valuation. The round failed to close in early April 2026, CoreWeave terminated the anchor lease shortly afterward, and as of May 2026 poolside has not closed a successor financing.

Affiliations

• Tyba: Co-founder and managing director, 2011 to April 2016.
• source{d}: Co-founder and chief executive officer, March 2015 to 2019.
• Athenian: Founder and chief executive officer, December 2019 to May 2023.
• poolside: Co-founder and chief technology officer, May 2023 to present.

Notable contributions

Kant's public output is concentrated on company-founding and developer-tooling work rather than published research.

• Twollars (2009). The first virtual-currency platform on Twitter, signing more than 300 charities across more than 30 countries.
• Tyba co-founding (2011 to 2016). Online-recruitment platform for European junior technology talent. Acquired by Graduateland in April 2016.
• source{d} co-founding (2015 to 2019). Open-source infrastructure for applying machine learning to source code at scale. The src-d GitHub organization preserves the open-source artifacts including the go-git Go-language Git implementation.
• Athenian founding (2019 to 2023). Engineering-analytics platform focused on team-level cycle-time and pull-request metrics rather than individual-engineer evaluation. Acquired by The Linux Foundation in November 2023.
• poolside co-founding (May 2023). Coding-foundation-model lab co-founded with Jason Warner. As of May 2026, poolside has raised approximately $626 million in cumulative capital, shipped its first proprietary foundation-model family, signed a U.S. Department of Defense partnership, and navigated the failed Series C round of 2025 to 2026.
• Public-talk record. RAAIS 2025 keynote at the Research and Applied AI Summit in London, June 13, 2025, on the poolside model-factory architecture; "Superhuman Coding Is Coming!" on Machine Learning Street Talk, April 2025; "Intelligence Isn't Enough: Why Energy & Compute Decide the AGI Race" on the MAD Podcast with Matt Turck; "Raising $500M To Compete in the Race for AGI" on The Twenty Minute VC with Harry Stebbings.
• Co-hosted podcast. Developing Leadership with Jason Warner since 2020, on engineering leadership.

Investments and boards

Entries below are limited to AI, semiconductors, datacenters, software, and energy.

• source{d} (AI / Software): Co-founder and chief executive officer, 2015 to 2019. Approximately six-million-dollar Series A in October 2016 with Xavier Niel, Otium Venture, and Sunstone Capital participating; subsequent Series B-stage capital.
• Athenian (Software): Founder and chief executive officer, 2019 to 2023. Acquired by The Linux Foundation in November 2023.
• poolside (AI): Co-founder and chief technology officer, May 2023 to present. Cumulative funding through May 2026 approximately $626 million.

No public personal angel-investor activity is on record in AI, semiconductors, datacenters, software, or energy as of May 2026.

Network

Kant's longest-running professional partnership is with Jason Warner, his poolside co-founder. The pair developed the poolside thesis through the Developing Leadership podcast they have co-hosted since 2020. Kant's prior source-code-analysis work at source{d} and engineering-process work at Athenian complement Warner's developer-platform operating record at GitHub and Heroku.

The IE University cohort produced two further long-running partnerships. Jorge Schnura, Kant's co-founder at both Tyba and source{d}, served as chief operating officer at source{d} and later co-founded the mobile-advertising company Unlockd. Philip von Have was the third Tyba co-founder and continued as a senior source{d} operator. The European seed-funding networks Kant developed at source{d} with Xavier Niel and Felicis Ventures carried forward into the August 2023 poolside seed extension.

Among coding-AI peer founders, Kant's position runs in parallel with the technical leadership at Cursor (Anysphere), Cognition AI, Codeium / Windsurf, and the in-house coding-AI products at Anthropic, OpenAI, and Google DeepMind. His public talks have characterized GitHub Copilot (which Warner oversaw at GitHub) as the principal incumbent product against which poolside positions.

Position in the field

As of May 2026, Kant occupies a distinctive position among coding-AI chief technology officers through the combination of two prior code-AI ventures (source{d} and Athenian) before the poolside founding, the European base across Madrid, Berlin, Paris, and Portugal, and the long-running co-founder partnership with Warner. The career arc through Tyba, source{d}, and Athenian maps onto the source-code-analysis and engineering-process-data foundations on which poolside foundation models are trained.

Industry coverage has consistently characterized poolside under the Warner-and-Kant partnership as a principal commercial coding-foundation-model lab globally, alongside Cursor (Anysphere), Cognition AI, and Codeium / Windsurf. Kant's RAAIS 2025 keynote framed the poolside thesis around model-factory iteration speed and the need for compute, energy, and intelligence to be controlled at the same level of the stack. The 2026 Series C failure and the CoreWeave Project Horizon collapse have, per DataCenterDynamics coverage of April 2026, shifted the public framing of poolside's near-term trajectory toward a more constrained capital environment.

Outlook

Open questions over the next 6 to 18 months:

• Series C successor. Whether poolside closes a successor financing in 2026, at what valuation relative to the $3 billion Series B and the $12 billion attempted level, and the lead-investor profile.
• Foundation-model release cadence. Capability profile of the next poolside foundation-model release relative to peer commercial coding-AI products, and published benchmark positions on software-engineering evaluations.
• Project Horizon recovery. Whether the Pecos County campus finds a replacement anchor tenant after the CoreWeave departure, and whether the project proceeds at the 2-gigawatt scale.
• Department of Defense partnership. Whether the partnership produces additional disclosed contracts or extends to allied-government customers.
• Senior-team stability. Whether the Warner and Kant founding partnership remains intact through the post-Series-C-failure phase.
• Public-commentary cadence. Frequency and substance of conference appearances and podcast interviews as poolside navigates the post-Series-C environment.

Sources

• Eiso Kant LinkedIn. Public profile listing the poolside, Athenian, source{d}, Tyba, and earlier roles.
• Eiso Kant on GitHub. Personal GitHub account with affiliation to the src-d source{d} organization.
• Eiso Kant Crunchbase profile. Crunchbase profile listing the poolside chief-technology-officer role and prior ventures.
• Eiso Kant at Inovia. Inovia Capital portfolio-founder bio summarizing the source{d}, Athenian, and poolside chronology.
• Eiso Kant on Web Design, Virtual Currency and Trusting Your Intuition. Wharton Global Youth Program profile documenting the Netherlands upbringing, the early PrimaPrints venture, and the Twollars founding.
• "Entrepreneurs", by Eiso Kant. IE University news article on the Netherlands background, the 2009 Madrid relocation, and the Tyba founding.
• Graduateland acquires Tyba. IE University announcement of the April 2016 acquisition with the Kant, Schnura, and von Have founding lineup.
• Tyba | Interview with co-founder Eiso Kant. Cleverism long-form interview covering the Tyba founding and the source{d} transition.
• Sourced launches an enterprise edition. TechCrunch July 2019 coverage of the source{d} enterprise-platform launch.
• Athenian gives you metrics about your engineering team. TechCrunch March 2022 profile of the Athenian engineering-analytics platform.
• Former GitHub CTO Jason Warner Raises $26 Million. Newcomer coverage of the May 2023 poolside seed round.
• US AI startup Poolside raises $126m seed round and relocates to France. Sifted coverage of the August 2023 seed extension and the Paris relocation.
• AI-Coding Startup Poolside Raises Massive $500M Series B. Crunchbase News coverage of the October 2024 Series B at $3 billion post-money valuation.
• Twitter charity a fistful of Twollars. Phys.org May 2009 coverage of the Twollars launch.
• Eiso Kant, CTO @Poolside: Raising $500M To Compete in the Race for AGI. Twenty Minute VC episode with Harry Stebbings on the Series B and the AGI thesis.
• Eiso Kant (CTO poolside) - Superhuman Coding Is Coming!. Machine Learning Street Talk April 2025 episode on the poolside foundation-model strategy.
• RAAIS 2025 - Eiso Kant, Co-Founder and CTO of poolside. RAAIS June 2025 keynote on the poolside model-factory architecture.
• There is no scaling wall: in discussion with Eiso Kant. Air Street Press summary of the RAAIS 2025 keynote.
• Poolside AI on Wikipedia. Wikipedia entry on the company history, founders, and funding milestones.
• Photo: Eiso Kant at RAAIS 2025, RAAIS speaker page.