code search
Auto Added by WPeMatico
Sourcegraph raises $125M Series D on $2.6B valuation for universal code search tool
Sourcegraph, a late-stage startup that wants to bring the power of search to code, announced a $125 million Series D investment today on a $2.625 billion valuation, a 3x growth from its previous valuation in December 2020, according to the company.
The round was led by Andreessen Horowitz, with participation from Insight Partners, Geodesic Capital and other existing investors. The company has now raised almost $225 million, according to Crunchbase data.
Company CEO and co-founder Quinn Slack says that we know by now that every company is building software, and as they do, they are generating tons of code. “They’re all drowning in code, and we help solve that. Our product is universal code search, which helps developers search, understand and automate code,” Slack explained.
He says that companies use Sourcegraph to find problems and vulnerabilities they might not otherwise see. Developers and site reliability engineers may see that there’s a problem, but getting to the specific part of the code where it’s happening requires a specialized tool, he says. Some of the large companies might build their own tools for this purpose, but most companies don’t have the resources and this puts code search within reach of many more developers.
“Universal code search that we built — and we spent a lot of time building it — is the first kind of code search that actually understands code as code and all the connections, that graph of code. And that means that if you’re a developer, you can get to that answer of how do I do this thing or how do I fix this or if I change this what’s going to break, in way less time and that’s why you need a purpose-built code search tool,” he said.
He says that the company was founded in 2013, but it took almost five years to build a product of this sophistication. The startup was able to get funding initially based on the potential of a tool like this. Now investors are seeing the traction they envisioned early on.
They have 800,000 developers using the product over the last 12 months, and Slack says that they have indexed over 54 billion lines of code. Paying customers include Plaid, Uber, GE and Atlassian. The company has around 160 employees and expects to increase that to 250 by the end of the year with all of this new capital.
The company made the fortunate decision to go fully remote in January of 2020 just a couple of months before offices shut down in the U.S., and his plan is to continue to be remote even after offices fully reopen.
Slack doesn’t shy away from the IPO question, saying it’s definitely something they think about. “We want to be a public company eventually, so that we can show that we’re going to be around forever. This funding certainly shows that we are growing, and that we are going to stick around and we’re going to be vendor independent, so you know that’s definitely an important part of our strategy.”
Powered by WPeMatico
Semmle, startup that makes code searchable, hauls in $21M Series B
Semmle, a startup that originally spun out of research at Oxford, announced a $21 million Series B investment today led by Accel Partners. It marked the second time Accel has led an investment in the company.
Work-Bench also participated in the round. Today’s investment brings the total to $31 million.
Semmle has warranted this kind of interest by taking a unique approach to finding vulnerabilities in code. “The key idea behind our technology is to treat code as data and treat analysis problems as simple queries against a database. What this allows you to do is very easily encode domain expertise, security expertise or any other kinds of specialist knowledge in such a way it can be easily and automatically applied to large amounts of code,” Pavel Avgustinov, Semmle co-founder and VP of platform engineering told TechCrunch.
Screenshot: Semmle
Once you create the right query, you can continuously run it against your code to prevent the same mistakes from entering the code base on subsequent builds. The key here is building the queries and the company has a couple of ways to deal with that.
They can work with customers to help them create queries, although in the long run that is not a sustainable way of working. Instead, they share queries, and encourage customers to share them with the community.
“What we find is that the great tech companies we work with have the best security teams in the world, and they are giving back what they created on the Semmle platform with other users in an open source fashion. There is a GitHub repository where we publish queries, but Microsoft and Google are doing the same thing,” Oege de Moor, company CEO and co-founder explained.
In fact, the Semmle solution is freely available to open source programmers to use with their applications, and the company currently analyzes every commit of almost 80,000 open source projects. Open source developers can run shared queries against their code or create their own.
They also have a paid version with customers like Microsoft, Google, Credit Suisse, NASA and Nasdaq. They have relied mostly on these strategic partners up until now. With today’s investment they plan to build out their sales and marketing departments to expand their customer base into a wider enterprise market.
The company spun out of research at Oxford University in 2006. They are now based in San Francisco with 60 employees, a number that should go up with this investment. They received an $8 million Series A in 2014 and $2 million seed round in 2011.
Powered by WPeMatico