Bill Tai, venture capitalist and board chair at Hut8, and Sanjay Gupta, chief strategy officer at Auradine Inc., join theCUBE’s John Furrier during theCUBE + NYSE Wired: Robotics & AI Infrastructure Leaders 2025 event to discuss the infrastructure realities behind robotics and AI’s explosive growth. Their conversation unpacks the critical intersection of decentralization, energy innovation and data center evolution.
Gupta outlines shifts in Bitcoin mining and semiconductor design as key drivers of infrastructure demand, especially as robotics and AI intensify hardware strain. Tai highlights the staggering energy implications of future deployments, with power requirements poised to rival residential usage on a national scale.
The discussion captures how capital, compute and climate considerations are converging in this next era of infrastructure design. The conversation offers a clear perspective from both the strategic investment and hardware innovation fronts.
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Matt McClernan, Augment Code
Bill Tai, venture capitalist and board chair at Hut8, and Sanjay Gupta, chief strategy officer at Auradine Inc., join theCUBE’s John Furrier during theCUBE + NYSE Wired: Robotics & AI Infrastructure Leaders 2025 event to discuss the infrastructure realities behind robotics and AI’s explosive growth. Their conversation unpacks the critical intersection of decentralization, energy innovation and data center evolution.
Gupta outlines shifts in Bitcoin mining and semiconductor design as key drivers of infrastructure demand, especially as robotics and AI intensify hardware strain. Tai highlights the staggering energy implications of future deployments, with power requirements poised to rival residential usage on a national scale.
The discussion captures how capital, compute and climate considerations are converging in this next era of infrastructure design. The conversation offers a clear perspective from both the strategic investment and hardware innovation fronts.
Matt McClernan, Chief Revenue Officer at Augment Code, joins Dave Vellante during theCUBE's coverage of NYSE + theCUBE AI Robotics Week. This insightful discussion focuses on the evolving landscape of artificial intelligence in development and its impact within enterprises. McClernan shares Augment Code's vision, which revolves around offering AI coding assistance, marking a significant shift in how developers interact with complex codebases.
McClernan delves into their background with MongoDB and the expertise brought to Augment Code. The conversati...Read more
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What is Augment Code and what does it aim to achieve in the AI coding assistance space?add
What are the implications of AI on go-to-market strategies and sales in the context of a rapidly growing company?add
>> Hi, everybody. This is Dave Vellante, and welcome to theCUBE's coverage here. This is NYSE + theCUBE AI Robotics Week. We've taken it to poolside here in Portola Valley. We're at the Rosewood. It's beautiful out here, and the weather's great. Really excited to have Matt McClernan on. He's the Chief Revenue Officer of Augment Code. What a great name, Matt. Thanks for coming on.
Matt McClernan
>> Yeah, thanks. I wish I could take credit for the name.
Dave Vellante
>> Well, I mean, it's kind of the hottest trend right now when people ask, "Well, not really getting value out of AI. ROI's not there." But it's definitely there when it comes to coding. Tell us about Augment Code.
Matt McClernan
>> Yeah. So we were founded in the summer of '22, and our goal, so we are an AI coding assistance space. Our goal is to help enterprise software developers with AI and facilitate their work on complex code bases. So it's quite different than a lot of the competition in the space that are generally focused on just generating code. Our focus is on giving developers the experience of working with a peer that's a senior software engineer, working on that code base, so that sort of knowledge. So we went GA with the product in November, and we're seeing really good traction since.
Dave Vellante
>> Okay. So the philosophy is human in the loop, senior human in the loop, with a less senior developer, and using AI, human plus AI drives the value?
Matt McClernan
>> Exactly.
Dave Vellante
>> So CRO, well, first of all, what's your background?
Matt McClernan
>> Most recently, I was with MongoDB, so I'll spare you kind of the history of it, but I'd say I was with MongoDB. I was fortunate to be on a nice run with them as we were kind of pre-IPO, post-IPO, and learned how to really sell to the developer market.
Dave Vellante
>> Yeah, nice. So when we think about code augmentation, we had Marc Benioff on a little while ago, and when I was prepping for the interview, I was watching a bunch of podcasts and things, and he was saying that they were seeing a 30% productivity improvement in their coding. And then by the time he came on our podcast, it was up to 50%, and he says, "We're not stopping."
We saw Andy Jassy today or yesterday talk about how AI is going to dramatically change the productivity of their organization. You're seeing large companies like IBM. I mean, hiring is relatively flat, coding is an area that is now being supercharged. So how are you guys taking advantage of all those trends and what's the sort of north star for?
Matt McClernan
>> Yeah. Well, fortunately, the major trend right now is every organization seems to accept they need some form of AI coding assistance in the organization, right? So I'd say there's a broad spectrum of how we take advantage of those trends with companies that are looking to really create a larger niche in a market. Obviously, they're looking at a product like ours to produce iterations on an existing product, and with larger organizations, they're looking to break down a really old code base and enable themselves to move faster, right? So we see the space where we think there's going to continue to be more hiring of software engineers and sort of leveling up of the sort of productivity we're seeing from developers.
Dave Vellante
>> CRO is one of the most important hires. You get your initial engineering team, you get product market fit. I don't know if you have product market fit. Do you feel like you have product market fit?
Matt McClernan
>> Yeah, we do.
Dave Vellante
>> You do? Okay. So now it's time to scale the go-to market.
Matt McClernan
>> Yes.
Dave Vellante
>> I mean, a lot of startups, they make that mistake, and they try to scale go-to-market before they have product market fit, and you don't even know what they're trying to solve for.
Matt McClernan
>> That's right.
Dave Vellante
>> So you've got that. But my question is how do you think about applying AI from a go-to-market standpoint? How is that changing the way you think about it? You obviously got experience with Mongo pre-IPO. Dave's done an amazing job there, great company, we've done their shows a number of times. But how do you think about the changes that are coming in sales as a result of AI?
Matt McClernan
>> Well, we're in an interesting situation specifically at Augment Code. In the space we're in, we're seeing such a gravitational pull and such an appetite in the market. It's driving tremendous top-line growth. And so it's putting us in this position where I say there isn't a traditional sort of blueprint we can lean on to scale a go-to-market organization, and so out of necessity, it causes us to think about different ways to support that type of growth and demand. And so of course, as you acknowledged, we're an AI company, so we're inclined to figure out ways to use it, but we're forced to figure out how do we serve a growing customer base that's growing by tens of thousands on a monthly basis? So there's natural areas of thinking, like, "Okay, from a customer success standpoint, how can we use AI to address really simple basic questions that are commonly coming up? How can we use AI to follow up with customers that maybe are not using our product as frequently as they once were?" So there's just so many different areas to think about how can we get things done with AI first so that we can ensure that we're being smart about adding humans across the globe?
Dave Vellante
>> Well, just like your approach in coding is to pair up a senior person to the junior person, presumably the role of the BDR is evolving quite dramatically, how emails are written, how to follow up, what the next-best action is. How are you seeing that relationship, and what have you learned from your product that you can bring to sales?
Matt McClernan
>> Yeah. I'd say we're still figuring that out, real-time figuring that out. There's still value in having that human touch. There's explosive growth in that space of SDR-, BDR-assisted AI products. But I think the perspective we're gaining is that still individuals, humans want to buy from humans, and they can sense when they're getting interaction with an AI BDR. And so we're looking more and more about how do we sort of couple that sort of deep understanding of how a customer might be using our product with AI, with a person that they can build a relationship with.
Dave Vellante
>> How about the relationship between marketing and sales? How is that changing? What do you need from the marketing department, if you will, and how is AI changing the potential there?
Matt McClernan
>> Yeah. Marketing's evolving really rapidly. And we're in the dev tool space, right? So developers are very religious about the products that you're using, and it's very much word of mouth and hype and excitement, you know? And typically, it's if there's some new exciting technology, developers will talk about it in various communities, and you'll see kind of a surge in the growth of these products. So I'd say from a marketing perspective, it's much more thoughtful around engaging different communities, community influencers, and sort of finding moments. One, to celebrate advances in your product and doing it on a cadence with some frequency, so I find that the alignment between marketing and your product teams needs to be really tight. We need to understand from a marketing perspective when we're going to have that next big release or feature. It has to happen frequently and we have to prepare the community and the influencers to be able to broadcast that message. And then for us, with a self-serve type of product as well, that then results in a lot of top-of-funnel interest.
Dave Vellante
>> Are you hiring?
Matt McClernan
>> Yeah.
Dave Vellante
>> What's your ideal hire? And then I want to ask about your ICP.
Matt McClernan
>> It depends on the function, right? We're hiring across all aspects of go-to-market at this point. I'd say it's ideally folks that have sold two developers before, software engineers. They understand the persona and the nuances and helping facilitate access to a product like ours. Because developers, they want to get their hands on a product, and they'll make that decision themselves. So people that understand that sale, and that's not just sellers, it's in marketing, it's in folks that are figuring out on the support side how to facilitate these communities to support each other. And then that's really North America for the moment, but we're quickly looking to EMEA, we're looking to APAC. We're seeing huge developer demand out of those-
Dave Vellante
>> And your ideal customer is obviously a developer, but is there a particular nuance in the persona that you're targeting?
Matt McClernan
>> Yeah. We find that the more senior, more experienced developers are the ones that are drawn most commonly to Augment because they value the context awareness our product has on their complex code base. So it's those folks, and I'd say it's very senior-level leaders, CTOs, SEPs of engineering.
Dave Vellante
>> Matt, thanks so much for-
Matt McClernan
>> Thanks, Dave....
Dave Vellante
>> coming on theCUBE. Really appreciate it.
Matt McClernan
>> Yeah. Thank you.
Dave Vellante
>> All right. Keep it right there for more action from the Rosewood. This is Dave Vellante for John Furrier and the whole CUBE team, NYSE Wired + theCUBE AI Robotics Week right there, right back, right after this short break.
Dave Vellante