A Vienna software startup founded by a cohort of former Apple Inc. engineers has emerged from stealth mode after landing $47 million in fresh funding — a substantial sum for a seed round.
Antithesis Operations LLC, which develops a technology that can automatically find bugs in software used across companies or organizations, will use the proceeds largely to build out its team of engineers and software developers in Greater Washington, where its leaders see ample opportunity to attract — and, importantly, keep — tech talent.
The funding from Amplify Partners of Menlo Park, California, New York's Tamarack Global and First In Ventures of Greenwich, Connecticut, comes more than five years after CEO Will Wilson and Chief Technology Officer Dave Scherer founded Antithesis. The company now has about 40 employees, most of whom are working at its headquarters at the WestWood Metro Tower complex on Westwood Center Drive.
Antithesis is the second local startup for the founders; they had previously founded the software firm FoundationDB, also in Vienna, before selling it to Apple in 2015. They all then moved to California to work for Apple but returned to the region because, Chief Operating Officer Nick Lavezzo told me, they believe their startup will have better success attracting and retaining talent here than in Silicon Valley, where tech workers tend to jump around frequently.
"For a company like ours that's trying to solve an incredibly hard technical problem, having continuity on the engineering team is very important," said Lavezzo, who was also a FoundationDB founder and has been with Antithesis since it started. "Somebody is just getting their feet wet here after nine months, which if you have people leaving at 15 months on average, that would end up really bad."
"We have people here who have been here for four or five years already. People tend to want to stick around, and that's definitely not the case out west," he added.
Antithesis' autonomous software testing platform can be deployed within an enterprise's computer networking infrastructure. This product can automatically search for bugs in any combination of open-source and in-house software. The platform offers Antithesis' users "a lot of special powers in debugging," as Lavezzo described it, so that remedies can be implemented before those bugs are found by consumers or others who are using the software.
Antithesis charges an annual fee per central processing unit on the platform. Denver-based software firm Palantir Technologies is one of Antithesis' better-known customers, though it has clients across a wide range of industries.
"A data analytics platform would be an obvious one," Lavezzo said of other potential customers Antithesis is targeting. "Some of the less obvious ones would be large e-commerce websites or even airlines or anything that has an exposure to a large number of users accessing it through an app or the web."
A report from May 2020 published by software bug-finding firm Undo and the Cambridge Judge Business School found that software-related failures collectively amount to $61 billion in annual salary costs. It takes 13 hours on average for a developer to find and fix a software-related failure, the report found.
That's where Antithesis comes in.
"We're helping them to find bugs before they cause problems, and then we're helping them to fix the bugs in a much more efficient way," Lavezzo said.
