GoKawiilAs AI coding tools generate billions of lines of code each month, a new bottleneck is emerging: ensuring that software works as intended. Qodo, a startup building AI agents for code review, testing and governance, is betting that verification will define the next phase of software development.
The New York-headquartered startup has raised a $70 million Series B round led by Qumra Capital, bringing its total funding to $120 million. Maor Ventures, Phoenix Venture Partners, S Ventures, Square Peg, Susa Ventures, TLV Partners, Vine Ventures, Peter Welender (OpenAI), and Clara Shih (Meta) also joined in the round.
Qodo is aiming to serve as a layer focused on improving trust in AI-generated code as enterprises accelerate adoption of tools like OpenClaw and Claude Code. Many are discovering that faster code output doesn’t necessarily translate into reliable or secure software.
While most AI review tools focus on what changed, Qodo focuses on how code changes affect entire systems, factoring in organizational standards, historical context, and risk tolerance to help companies better manage AI-generated code more confidently.
Itamar Friedman, who previously co-founded Visualead and led the machine vision business at Alibaba (which acquired Visualead), founded Qodo in 2022. He told TechCrunch that two key moments in his career — his time at Mellanox, which was later acquired by Nvidia, and building Visualead — inspired him to start Qodo, just months before the launch of ChatGPT.
At Mellanox, where he worked on automating hardware verification using machine learning, he realized that “generating systems and verifying systems require very different approaches (different tools, different thinking).” Later, at Alibaba’s Damo Academy, he saw AI evolve toward systems capable of reasoning over human language. By 2021–2022, just ahead of GPT-3.5, it became clear to him that AI would generate a large share of the world’s content—especially code—reinforcing his view that code generation and verification would require fundamentally different systems.
A recent survey shows that while 95% of developers don’t fully trust AI-generated code, only 48% consistently review it before committing, highlighting a gap between awareness and practice.
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