poolside

poolside is the San Francisco lab building foundation models specifically for software development, founded in 2023 by former GitHub CTO Jason Warner and Eiso Kant. It raised a $500 million Series B led by Bain Capital Ventures in October 2024, and in October 2025 Nvidia announced an investment of up to $1 billion that valued the company around $12 billion. Laguna S 2.1, released July 21, 2026, is poolside's first major public model: a 118 billion parameter mixture-of-experts with roughly 8 billion active per token, a 1 million token context window, and open weights on Hugging Face day one under the OpenMDW-1.1 license. Hosted pricing is $0.10 per million input tokens and $0.20 per million output, among the cheapest frontier-adjacent coding rates available. poolside reports 70.2 percent on Terminal-Bench 2.1 in thinking mode, 78.5 percent on SWE-Bench Multilingual, and 40.4 percent on DeepSWE, and it published the full unedited trajectory of every benchmark trial alongside a disclosure that the Terminal-Bench numbers come from its own harness. In a week when three separate launches shipped with no independently checkable evidence at all, that transparency is the differentiator worth watching more than the score itself. The 8 billion active parameter design also makes it one of the few open-weight coding models that a small team can actually self-host.