[ad_1]
Software testing is hard. Even with the right talent in place, things don’t always go as planned, especially when executed at scale. In a 2020 survey from Electric Cloud, 58% of developers blame software bugs on testing infrastructure and process issues – not design flaws.
The market for software testing solutions is, unsurprisingly, quite massive, with a estimate pegging it at $55.98 billion. There are many providers in the industry, from startups like A mess, EvaluateAgent And Codegen to incumbent operators like Azure and AWS.
But a new entrant, Antithesisthink it might cause a sensation.
Antithesis, which emerged today from Stealth, was founded by the team behind FoundationDBthe distributed database platform, which Apple has quietly acquired in 2015. Following the Apple acquisition, the FoundationDB team dispersed to pursue jobs at other large technology companies, but ultimately came to the same conclusion: Even sophisticated organizations didn’t have the software testing tools they needed to be more effective.
“Five years ago, several of us came 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 stealth, made it the only commercially available system of its kind for general software testing.”
Antithesis’ product continuously scans the latest version of software under development for bugs in a simulated environment separate from production (complete with virtual hardware, service and network components), replicating and providing Debug information for detected bugs. This approach eliminates the need for developers to manually write their own tests, Wilson says, which is typically a long and tedious process.
Antithesis runs software under a range of predefined conditions and properties to report any unintended behavior. When it notices interesting behavior, Antithesis makes a copy of the system state and explores possible outcomes from that point onwards – exploring “more intensely” the paths that produce anomalous logs.
“Autonomous testing is an important application [that can make] developers are more productive,” Wilson said. “[It] this gives engineers nearly half the time they would have spent on bug-related issues and allows them to develop with confidence.
This assumes that Antithesis’ technology works as advertised. Investors seem enthusiastic, in any case: Antithesis today closed a $47 million funding round from Amplify Partners, Tamarack Global, First In Ventures and angel investors including Howard Lerman, the founder of Yext and Roam.
The round – unusually large for a seed – values Antithesis at $215 million, Reuters reports first reported and a source close to the matter confirmed to TechCrunch.
“A group of existing investors were very excited about our progress and offered 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.” »
Antithesis, based in Virginia, already works with clients including Palantir, Ethereum and MongoDB and other unnamed “big companies,” as well as startups. But the funding will allow it to broaden that base, Wilson says, by expanding Antithesis’s sales and marketing teams, scaling up engineering and research efforts, and supporting continued feature and product development.
[ad_2]