UK pioneer in using artificial intelligence (AI) to write software extends platform to increase speed, confidence and insight during development; AlbionVC leads funding round to target $40 billion market opportunity

Diffblue, creators of the world’s first fully autonomous AI-for-code software, today announced unique new code-writing capabilities for its Cover product and new venture funding.

AlbionVC led an $8 million up round with participation from venture investors IP Group, Parkwalk, Hostplus and Oxford Technology and Innovations EIS Fund. To date, Diffblue has raised more than $40 million in venture funding.

“Citi Markets uses its deep software expertise to move faster and be more competitive. We find value in Diffblue’s auto-generation of test cases, which helps drive test consistency and coverage of our software. This frees up developers to focus on delivering higher quality software, faster – and improves our developers’ experience,” said Jonathan Lofthouse, Managing Director & Global Head of Markets Technology, Citi. “We’re pleased to see the new Diffblue product capabilities and funding.”

The new capabilities in Diffblue Cover give enterprises running Java a unique way to leverage the business value of unit testing by allowing them to:

• Autonomously write and maintain unit test suites for entire applications;
• Automatically refactor Java code to improve testability;
• Slash the time and cost to run tests in CI (Continuous Integration);
• Help development managers understand test coverage and code risk across their organization.

“The world faces a huge economic problem: there is far more software to be written than there are people to do it,” said Mathew Lodge, CEO of Diffblue. “Diffblue’s software helps leading financial services, healthcare and technology companies around the world accelerate their application modernization projects, reduce failures in production, and empowers developers to focus on what they do best – write great code.”

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By using AI to automate, expand and accelerate unit testing – the key enabler of fast delivery of high-quality code – Diffblue Cover gives enterprises new ways to improve software development for competitive market advantage. Cover enables enterprises to transform developer productivity, modernize applications and adopt cloud-native architecture, and safely deliver projects like cloud migration and the embrace of microservices.

Interest in AI-powered tools is growing as developers and IT leaders recognize the value they can deliver. With software testing currently estimated to be a $40 billion market^[1] that is expected to grow at a CAGR of 6 percent through 2030, investors and global enterprises increasingly see opportunity in new AI-powered technologies such as Diffblue to transform this crucial aspect of software development.

“AI-augmented coding is transforming software development,” said Robert Whitby-Smith, Partner, AlbionVC. “We see Diffblue as the leader in the space because it has the only fully automated offering, unique and differentiated technology, and a rapidly growing blue-chip customer base. It enjoys a first-mover advantage in the critical enterprise software development arena targeting millions of developers and we were impressed by its recent traction, in particular in the US. They are very well positioned to create a new category leader and take a significant portion of a multi-billion dollar market opportunity.”

Reflecting accelerating adoption of a new generation of software development tools, a recent Gartner® report^[2] noted, “Software engineering leaders are looking for new practices and approaches that their teams can adopt to mitigate risks to the business. Test automation, increasingly powered and enhanced by artificial intelligence/machine learning (AI/ML) technologies, becomes an indispensable building block for building digital immunity.”

Diffblue Cover includes four key new features built on an enhanced version of Cover Core, the AI engine powering the product’s foundational analysis and test writing capabilities:

• Diffblue Cover Reports pinpoints unique, actionable insights that allow users to precisely target available resources and improve the quality of their code;
• Diffblue Cover Optimize slashes the time needed to deliver Java code in CI pipelines, and significantly reduces related costs;
• Diffblue Cover Refactor suggests and applies changes that improve existing code by making it more testable, automatically increasing test coverage;
• Diffblue Cover Replay improves software quality by using live production behavior and existing functional tests to create new unit tests.

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