Software testing is hard. Even with the right talent in place, things don’t always go as planned — particularly when executed at scale. In a 2020 survey by Electric Cloud, 58% of developers accused software bugs in test infrastructure and process issues — not design flaws.
The market for software testing solutions is quite large, unsurprisingly, with one assessment pegging it at $55.98 billion. There are many vendors in the space, from startups like Qase, EvaluAgent, and Codegen to incumbents like Azure and AWS.
But a newcomer, Contrasthe thinks he can make waves.
Antithesis, which emerged from stealth today, was founded by the team behind FoundationDB, the distributed database platform that Apple quietly acquired in 2015. After Apple’s acquisition, the FoundationDB team disbanded to pursue other jobs at the Big Tech company, but ultimately came to the same conclusion: Even sophisticated organizations lacked the software testing tools they needed to be more effective.
“So, five years ago, a number of us got back together to build Antithesis,” Will Wilson, the 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 secrecy, 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 errors in a simulation environment separate from production (complete with virtual hardware, services, and network components), replicating and providing debugging information for errors it finds. This approach eliminates the need for developers to manually write their own tests, Wilson claims, which is usually a time-consuming and laborious process.
Antithesis runs software under a series of conditions and predefined properties to report any unintended behavior. When it notices interesting behavior, Antithesis creates a copy of the system state and explores possible outcomes from that point — exploring “more intense” paths that produce abnormal logs.
“Standalone testing is an important application [that can make] developers more productive,” Wilson said. “[It] it gives engineers almost half their time back from the time they would have spent on bug-related issues and allows them to develop with confidence.”
This means that Antithesis’ technology works as advertised. Investors seem excited about it either way — Antithesis closed a $47 million seed round today from Amplify Partners, Tamarack Global, First In Ventures and angel investors, including Yext and Roam founder Howard Lerman.
The round — unusually large for a seed — values Antithesis at $215 million, first Reuters mentionted 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 more on friendly terms,” Wilson said. “We took the opportunity to continue working with people we trusted and avoid a big fundraising roadshow with its attendant distractions.”
Virginia-based Antithesis already works with clients including Palantir, Ethereum and MongoDB and other unnamed “big businesses” as well as startups. But the funding will allow it to grow that base, Wilson says, by expanding Antithesis’ sales and marketing teams, increasing engineering and research efforts, and supporting continued feature and product development.
