Software testing is hard. Even with the right talent, not everything always goes as planned, especially when executing at scale. In a 2020 Electric Cloud survey, 58% of developers blamed software bugs in test infrastructure and process problems, not design defects.
As expected, the software testing solutions market is quite massive, with one estimate setting it at 55.98 billion dollars. There are many vendors in the space, from startups like Qase, EvaluAgent, and Codegen to traditional companies like Azure and AWS.
But a new participant, AntithesisHe thinks he can cause a sensation.
Antithesis, which emerged today by stealth, was founded by the team behind FoundationDB, the distributed database platform, which Apple quietly acquired in 2015. After the Apple acquisition, the FoundationDB team dispersed to pursue other work at large technology companies, but ultimately came to the same conclusion: even sophisticated organizations lacked the software testing tools they needed to be more efficient.
“So five years ago, several of us got back together to build Antithesis,” Will Wilson, co-founder and CEO of Antithesis, told TechCrunch in an email interview. “We took FoundationDB's rigorous testing approach, matured it, and, after years of operating in secret, made it the only system of its kind commercially available for general software testing.”
The Antithesis product continuously scans the latest version of software under development for errors within a simulated, production-independent environment (complete with virtual hardware, services, and network components), reproducing and providing debugging information for errors that occur. finds. This approach eliminates the need for developers to manually write their own tests, Wilson says, which is often a complicated and time-consuming process.
Antithesis runs software under a variety of predefined conditions and properties to report any unwanted behavior. When it notices interesting behavior, Antithesis makes a copy of the system state and explores possible outcomes from that point, exploring “harder” for paths that produce abnormal logs.
“Autonomous testing is an important application (that can make) developers more productive,” Wilson said. (This) gives engineers back almost half the time they would have spent on bug-related issues and allows them to develop with confidence.”
That assumes Antithesis' technology works as advertised. In any case, investors seem excited: Antithesis closed a $47 million seed round today from Amplify Partners, Tamarack Global, First In Ventures, and angel investors including Howard Lerman, founder of Yext and Roam.
The round, unusually large for a seed, values Antithesis at $215 million, according to Reuters for the first time. technology/code-testing-startup-antithesis-raises-seed-funding-215-mln-valuation-2024-02-13/”>reported and a source familiar with the matter confirmed to TechCrunch.
“A group of existing investors were very excited about our progress and came to us with a proposal to invest further on friendly terms,” Wilson said. “We jumped at the opportunity to continue working with people we trusted and avoid a big fundraising tour with the distractions that come with it.”
Virginia-based Antithesis is already working with clients such as Palantir, ethereum and MongoDB and other unnamed “big companies,” as well as startups. But the funding will allow it to grow that base, Wilson says, expanding Antithesis' sales and marketing teams, increasing engineering and research efforts, and supporting ongoing feature and product development.
