About DRW

DRW Holdings, LLC is one of the largest proprietary trading firms in the world, based out of Chicago but with a global presence of thousands of employees.

DRW prides itself on incorporating cutting-edge technology to maintain their culture of tech leadership and competitive advantage, and so was one of the first organizations to seriously work to implement generative AI for improving their internal operations and market performance. Now it is well recognized that a great first, measurable use case of generative AI is for increasing software development velocity. DRW was early in recognizing this well over a year ago, and moved quickly to evaluate partners that could assist in this respect.

While looking for partners, DRW had clear requirements and goals:

Must work with the existing security and audit needs, both from a desire to maintain security of confidential algorithms and the general governance of the financial industry.
Must work with their tech stack, and provide personalized results given the uniqueness and complexity of DRW’s work.
Must be able to demonstrate measurable, quantitative value while also passing the qualitative sniff test of DRW’s engineering teams.
Codeium, after an evaluation with DRW developers on production use cases, stood out as the best partner for DRW due to Codeium’s non-SaaS deployment options, industry-leading contextual awareness engine, and broad compatibility with any tech stack - source control, development environment, or language.

Results

We always love to hear how quickly our customers can implement and realize real value from the tool. At DRW, the value to developer productivity was immediately recognized, and has continued to persist over time, as Filip Viskovic, Developer Experience Team Lead at DRW, states:

Implementing Codeium Enterprise in our environment was straightforward and seamless, and it immediately boosted our productivity by providing indispensable daily coding support to our developers. All while safeguarding our intellectual property and getting better results than competitor products.

One of Codeium’s unique differences is its advanced context awareness capabilities, such as multi-repository context awareness. The value of this engine was also clear to DRW developers. As Alec Cunningham, Developer Experience Engineer at DRW, notes:

I’ve found that Codeium’s ability to index multiple repositories provides autocompletion that is leagues beyond other models that can only read from one file at a time.

The numbers back up the value. Over the last year of using Codeium, DRW has accepted hundreds of thousands of code suggestions every month, leading to roughly ten thousand developer hours saved in just time saved from not needing to type out the accepted suggestions alone. Trusted metrics such as these and many more were available to DRW in real time via secure analytics dashboards.

With time, the DRW team started noticing value beyond just the traditional definitions of developer productivity, which are generally confined to developers who are already up to speed in their roles. For example, they noted that onboarding developers took much less time, which is difficult to measure within the constraints of a pilot’s duration, but is one of the many productivity-orthogonal value propositions attributable to context-aware AI coding assistants such as Codeium.

Looking Forward

We are proud to partner with DRW and other companies excited to leverage generative AI to not just drive real productivity wins, but to free up time to tackle more projects to drive their businesses forward. We plan on continuing to iterate on the evolving frontier of possibility with generative AI in software development, and shipping those advancements to our customers such as DRW.

If you are interested in discussing how generative AI can drive your software development forward, please reach out.