Continue is an open-source AI coding platform that started life as a customisable AI code assistant for VS Code and JetBrains, and has since expanded into source-controlled AI checks that run on every pull request. The product is built around the idea that engineering standards should be defined by humans in markdown files inside the repo, and enforced by AI as native GitHub status checks with suggested fixes when code falls short.
In its IDE form, Continue plugs into any large language model — open or proprietary — and provides autocomplete, chat, code editing, and autonomous agent workflows. Teams can layer in their own context by connecting tools such as Jira, Confluence, or internal docs, so suggestions reflect the organisation's actual conventions rather than generic boilerplate.
Continue was founded in June 2023 by CEO Ty Dunn and CTO Nate Sesti and went through Y Combinator. After YC it raised an initial $2.1M round led by Jesse Robbins at Heavybit, then announced a $3M seed in February 2025 alongside its 1.0 release. By 2026 the open-source project had accumulated more than 32,000 GitHub stars and 2.4M+ installs on the Visual Studio Marketplace.
The company's traction has come largely from developer love for the open-source extension. Its commercial wedge is now Continue Hub and the PR-check product, where enterprise customers can publish reusable assistants, share configurations across teams, and enforce standards in CI.
Continue's differentiator versus Cursor, Copilot, and Cody is openness: any model, any context source, configuration that lives in the repo and is reviewable like code. The trade-off is that buyers responsible for security and compliance must choose models, hosts, and infrastructure themselves — which is a strength for sophisticated teams and friction for everyone else.