Startup Gitar raises $9 million to enhance code quality

With the rise of "vibe coding," AI agents have unleashed a flood of code that many companies are now struggling to manage. This sudden inundation has been termed "code overload." Reports indicate that AI-generated code can introduce significant issues, including bugs and other quality problems, which must be rectified by senior engineers before the code can be shipped to market.

Now, a new company is attempting to address this issue by utilizing the very tool that created it: AI. Gitar, a startup founded by Ali-Reza Adl-Tabatabai, a veteran of Intel Labs, Google, and Uber, emerged from stealth mode on Wednesday with a $9 million funding round led by Venrock, with participation from Sierra Ventures. Two-year-old Gitar offers subscription access to its platform, which deploys AI agents to perform a variety of code-quality operations, including code reviews and managing continuous integration workflows.

The platform also empowers engineering teams to create their own agents, capable of conducting security and maintenance operations on their behalf. "AI-generated code means more code to review, more tests to write, and more CI failures to diagnose," said Adl-Tabatabai, the CEO. What Gitar does is "code validation," he explained, ensuring that what is being built within an enterprise is ready for primetime.

Adl-Tabatabai envisions automation taking on an even broader role in software development in the future. "Currently, code that gets shipped into production requires human review, and there are good reasons for that. You want to ensure oversight, and humans are checking to make sure nothing bad is being shipped," he noted. His vision is for human code reviews to become a minimal part of the process, with companies instead trusting Gitar’s platform to handle those tasks and ship faster.

"We have a validation agent that can automatically ensure that your code is safe to ship, involving humans only in exceptional cases," Adl-Tabatabai claimed. While there are already numerous companies operating in the automated code-review space, Gitar hopes to distinguish itself through its singular focus on the problem. "Most of the market chased code generation. We didn’t," he said. "Gitar is built around what happens after code is written."

The new funding will be used to hire across Gitar’s engineering and product teams as the San Mateo company doubles down on developing the systems that allow it to provide its services at scale.