Briefs · Education and Upskilling
A Harvard alum built a machine that writes software, and it is now a unicorn
Sid Pardeshi spent six years at NVIDIA designing AI tools, then went to Harvard and built a company to replace the most tedious part of his own job.
Blitzy, the autonomous software development platform he co-founded with Brian Elliott, both MS/MBA ‘24, has raised $200 million at a $1.4 billion valuation. It is the second unicorn founded by an MS/MBA alumnus, after Nominal. The Cambridge startup has grown to 80 employees in its first three years.
The mission is blunt: “100% autonomy in software development.” The platform writes code, tests it, finds security flaws, fixes errors and writes progress reports. Pardeshi’s own estimate: of 100 hours of project work, Blitzy reliably completes at least 80, leaving humans the conceptual work machines cannot yet do.
The company was born in a Harvard class called “Launching Tech Ventures in the Age of AI”, and its first client came from that classroom.
Conclusion: Blitzy is not a tool for programmers, but rather a programmer that happens to be a tool, and it has just been valued accordingly.
Read the original at Harvard SEAS
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