Qodo, a New York-headquartered startup building AI agents for code review, testing and governance, has secured a $70 million Series B funding round. The investment, led by Qumra Capital, brings the company's total funding to $120 million as it positions verification as the critical next phase in software development.
The funding arrives amid rapid enterprise adoption of AI coding tools like GitHub Copilot and Claude Code, which are generating billions of lines of code monthly. Qodo's founder, Itamar Friedman, argues that while generation has accelerated, ensuring code works as intended presents a new bottleneck. "Code generation companies are largely built around LLMs. But for code quality and governance, LLMs alone aren’t enough," Friedman told TechCrunch.
Bridging the Trust Gap
A recent industry survey highlights a significant disconnect: while 95% of developers express distrust in AI-generated code, only 48% consistently review it before committing. Qodo aims to bridge this gap by moving beyond simple change analysis. Its system evaluates how code changes affect entire software systems, incorporating organisational standards, historical context, and specific risk tolerance.
"Quality is subjective. It depends on organisational standards, past decisions, and tribal knowledge. An LLM can’t fully understand that context," Friedman explained, comparing it to asking a top engineer from one firm to review code at another without internal knowledge.
Performance and Enterprise Adoption
Qodo is leaning on technical performance to differentiate itself in a competitive market. The startup recently ranked first on Martian’s Code Review Bench with a score of 64.3%, more than 10 points ahead of the next competitor and 25 points ahead of Claude Code Review. The benchmark tests the ability to identify complex logic bugs and cross-file issues without overwhelming developers.
In the past month, Qodo launched version 2.0 of its multi-agent code review system, which now leads current benchmarks, and introduced tools that learn each organisation's unique definition of code quality. Its client roster includes major enterprises like NVIDIA, Walmart, Red Hat, Intuit and Texas Instruments, alongside high-growth firms such as Monday.com and JFrog.
Founder's Vision and Market Context
Founder Itamar Friedman previously co-founded Visualead, later acquired by Alibaba, and worked at Mellanox, which was acquired by NVIDIA. His experiences in automating hardware verification and seeing AI's evolution at Alibaba's Damo Academy convinced him that code generation and verification require fundamentally different systems. He founded Qodo in 2022, months before ChatGPT's launch.
Friedman sees the industry entering a new phase. "Every year has had a defining moment — from Copilot to ChatGPT to full task automation," he said. "Now we’re moving from stateless AI to stateful systems — from intelligence to 'artificial wisdom.' That’s what Qodo is built for."
While giants like OpenAI and Anthropic influence the narrative, Friedman notes they are largely focused on building features rather than comprehensive, end-to-end solutions for code verification, a space where many other startups remain in early stages.