Gitar, a startup that uses agents to secure code, emerges from stealth with $9 million

With the advent of “vibe coding,” AI agents have unleashed a deluge of code onto companies that many are now struggling to manage. This sudden inundation has been called “code overload.” Reports have shown that AI-generated code can introduce significant problems—including bugs and other quality issues—into codebases, which then have to be fixed by senior engineers before the code can be “shipped” to market.

Now, a new company is trying to fix this problem using the same tool that caused it: AI.

Gitar—a startup founded by Ali-Reza Adl-Tabatabai, a veteran of Intel Labs, Google, and Uber—emerged from stealth Wednesday with a $9 million funding round led by Venrock, with participation from Sierra Ventures.

Two-year-old Gitar sells subscription access to its platform, which deploys AI agents to perform a wide variety of code-quality operations, including code reviews and the management of continuous integration workflows—the automated process of regularly merging and testing code changes to keep a codebase stable and up to date. The platform also gives engineering teams the ability to create their own agents, which can then conduct security and maintenance operations on their behalf.

AI-generated code means “more code to review, more tests to write, more CI failures to diagnose,” Adl-Tabatabai, who is CEO, told TechCrunch. What Gitar does is “code validation,” he said—a way to ensure that what’s being built within an enterprise is ready for primetime. “Generation produces code; validation makes it trustworthy. Gitar is the workflow agent that owns that process, orchestrating reviews, tests, and diagnostics end to end,” he added.

In the future, Adl-Tabatabai sees automation taking on an even more comprehensive role in software development. “Right now, code that gets shipped into production involves human review, and there are good reasons for that, right? You want to make sure that there’s oversight, and humans are checking to make sure that nothing bad is being shipped.”

His vision is that human code reviews will 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, and involves humans only in exception cases,” Adl-Tabatabai claimed.

There are already numerous other companies already operating in the automated code-review space, but Gitar hopes to distinguish itself through its singular focus on the problem. “Most of the market chased [code] generation. We didn’t,” Adl-Tabatabai 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, while the San Mateo company doubles down on developing the systems that allow it to provide its services at scale.