Fairfax tech firm Antithesis exits stealth mode with $47M

It’s appropriate that Vienna software startup Antithesis is housed in the former headquarters of Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Circus’ parent company. After all, Antithesis emerged from stealth mode in February to announce it had raised a Jumbo-sized $47 million in seed funding.

Founded in 2018, Antithesis is an AI-powered cloud platform for autonomously debugging and continuously testing reliability of software. It was developed by a team who previously worked for FoundationDB, a Vienna-based tech startup specializing in databases that was acquired by Apple in 2015.

The five-year seed round was led by Amplify Partners, Tamarack Global and First In Ventures. Angel investors included New York tech firm Yext’s founder, Howard Lerman, and CEO, Michael Walrath.

Antithesis co-founder Will Wilson says the company’s focus is to identify serious bugs and vulnerabilities within software that often evade human detection. “We’re finding the kinds of problems that are very hard for human beings to discover or reproduce and the ones that maybe we didn’t think to go looking for.”

In the highly competitive world of tech startups, it’s not unusual for companies to operate silently for a while before publicly unveiling a new technology or product, and Antithesis was no exception to this strategy.

“From the ground up, we had to build some really new things and some technology that was very hard, and we wanted to be able to focus on that without a lot of distraction and without giving any potential competitors a heads-up about what we were doing,” Wilson says. “And we were very lucky that we were able to raise a lot of money … and hire lots of great people and get lots of great early customers while still being stealth.”

Jonathan Perl, a partner at Colorado VC firm Boulder Ventures, invested when the startup began seeking capital in 2019. “These guys were doing something ambitious in the quality testing part of software development,” says Perl, “and we thought that was a big deal.”

Antithesis has found advantages in the NoVa region’s quality of life, stability, and highly skilled labor pool from government contracting.

“There’s a lot of really great talent in Northern Virginia, especially among engineers,” Wilson says. “They really know their stuff when it comes to computers … but unlike in San Francisco, we’re able to keep them for the long haul.” 

Editor Richard Foster contributed to this story.