Antithesis, which claims a more effective way to identify and resolve bugs in software, has emerged from five-year stealth and said it raised $47 million in seed funding led by San Francisco-based Amplify Partners, Greenwich, Conn.-based Tamarack Global, and Washington, D.C.-based First In Ventures. According to Reuters, the seed funding round valued Antithesis at $215 million.
The Vienna, Va., startup was established by former Apple and Google engineer Will Wilson, who discovered a gold mine, in a manner of speaking, in a previous startup, FoundationDB, acquired by Apple in 2015.
Eureka Moment
Surprisingly, Wilson said in a company blog post, Apple used FoundationDB’s distributed database as the “underpinning” of its cloud infrastructure, but virtually abandoned another key feature — deterministic simulation testing.
The discovery prompted Wilson to call his former boss, Dave Scherer — FoundationDB’s chief architect — and proclaim: “There’s a $100 bill lying on the sidewalk here, man.” The two then joined hands in 2018 and started Antithesis with the “goal of bringing the superpower of FoundationDB-style deterministic autonomous testing to everybody else.”
Antithesis has since improved on the testing technology Wilson and Scherer built into FoundationDB, notably adding artificial intelligence.
‘Space-age’ Debugging
Today, the company describes itself as a “continuous reliability” platform that uses a simulated environment to autonomously search for problems in software. A key advantage of Antithesis’ technology is the “deterministic” nature of its findings — it can perfectly reproduce the bug, unlike other systems that have far more “unknown unknowns.” Once it has identified a bug, the platform can bring “relatively space-age and insane debugging capabilities to bear on it,” Wilson said.
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Antithesis’ is designed to be able one day to find “many kinds of bugs in many kinds of software,” but for now the company is focused “solely” on reliability of distributed systems and fault tolerance testing.
With customers such as MongoDB, data-miner Palantir and the Ethereum Foundation, Antithesis is constantly improving its platform to meet emerging needs.
“Initially, these customers thought of Antithesis as a ‘special forces’ tool that primarily helped them find and replicate their most elusive and dangerous bugs,” Wilson wrote. “But as our platform has become more mature and interactive, we’ve shifted to being an ‘always on’ service that continuously tests the most recent builds of their software, thus shortening the time from bug introduction to bug discovery.”
