Tech innovators Oleg Klimov, Vlad Guber, and Oleg Kiyashko collaborated to establish Refact.ai, a pioneering platform aimed at encouraging wider adoption of GenAI for coding by offering users enhanced customization and control over their coding experience.Having accumulated nearly a decade of experience building AI-based systems for image recognition and security, Klimov and Kiyashko recognized the transformative potential of AI in engineering. Klimov stated in a recent email interview with TechCrunch, "As software engineers at heart, we decided we need to be in the best position to live through it — creating an independent system for software engineering." Acknowledging the seismic shifts propelled by AI in the coding profession, an overwhelming 82% of developers, according to a recent HackerRank poll, believe that AI will redefine the future of coding and software development.

Despite this, employers, as revealed in a separate survey of enterprise C-suite and IT professionals, express skepticism, with 85% citing concerns about GenAI's privacy and security risks.Major companies, including Apple, Samsung, Goldman Sachs, Walmart, and Verizon, have restricted internal use of GenAI tools due to apprehensions about data compromise. In this landscape, Refact.ai stands out, offering capabilities similar to GitHub Copilot and Amazon CodeWhisperer but with a distinctive advantage—it operates offline and does not upload basic telemetry data, addressing privacy concerns.Refact.ai's platform is powered by compact, code-generating models trained on permissively licensed code, a key competitive edge according to Klimov. Unlike some competitors that use copyrighted or restrictively licensed code, Refact avoids potential liability risks by training its models on open-source, permissively licensed code.

This privacy- and intellectual property-conscious approach has earned Refact.ai $2 million in funding from undisclosed investors and secured approximately 20 pilot projects with enterprise customers. The platform, available in a cloud-hosted plan starting at $10 per seat per month, is reportedly revenue-generating and on track to earn "a few million" annually by this summer.Refact's success is particularly notable in an industry where profitability has proven elusive for code-generating tools. GitHub's Copilot, for instance, reportedly cost Microsoft up to $80 per user per month due to associated cloud processing overhead.

Looking ahead, the London-based Refact team, comprised of eight individuals, aims to enhance the platform to run code autonomously, execute "multi-step" plans, and self-test code. Klimov emphasized, "We're actively working on a next-generation AI assistant – one that'll debug the code it writes and operate on any large codebase." Despite not benefiting from an abundance of funding or participating in the previous venture capital frenzy, Refact.ai's success is attributed to the talent and enthusiasm of individuals keen on joining the AI revolution and contributing to a product with a lasting impact.