Snyk acquires DeepCode to boost its code review smarts

Switzerland-based machine learning code review startup DeepCode — which bills itself as ‘Grammarly for coders’ — has been acquired by Snyk, a post-unicorn valuation cybersecurity startup which is focused on helping developers secure their code.

Financial terms of the deal have not been disclosed. But the ‘big code’ parsing startup had only raised around $5.2M since being founded back in 2016, per CrunchBase — mostly recently closing a $4M seed round from investors including Earlybird, 3VC and btov Partners last year.

DeepCode CEO and co-founder Boris Paskalev confirmed the whole team is “eagerly” joining Snyk to continue what he couched as “the mission of making semantic AI-driven code analysis available for every developer on the planet”.

“DeepCode as a company will continue to exist (fully owned by Snyk), we will keep and plan to grow the Zurich office and tap into the amazing talent pool here and we will continue supporting and expanding the cutting-edge product offering for the global development community,” Paskalev told TechCrunch.

Asked whether DeepCode’s product will continue to exist as a standalone in the future or whether full assimilation into Snyk’s platform will include closing down the code-review bot it currently offers developers he said no decision has yet been taken.

“We are still to evaluate that in details but the main goal is to maintain/expand the benefits that we offer to all developers and specifically to grow the open-source adoption and engagement,” he said, adding: “Initially clearly nothing will change and the DeepCode product will remain as a standalone product.”

“Both companies have a very clear vision and passion for developer-first and helping developers and security teams to further reduce risk and become more productive,” Paskalev added.

In a statement announcing the acquisition Snyk said it will be integrating DeepCode’s technology into its Cloud Native Application Security platform — going on to tout the benefits of bolting on its AI engine which it said would enable developers to “more quickly identify vulnerabilities”.

“DeepCode’s AI engine will help Snyk both increase speed and ensure a new level of accuracy in finding and fixing vulnerabilities, while constantly learning from the Snyk vulnerability database to become smarter,” wrote CEO Peter McKay. “It will enable an even faster integration for developers, testing for issues while they develop rather than as an additional step. And it will further increase the accuracy of our results, almost eliminating the need to waste time chasing down false positives.”

Among the features that have impressed Snyk about DeepCode, McKay lauded code scanning that’s “10-50x faster than alternatives”; and what he described as an “exceptional developer UX” — which allows for “high precision semantic code analysis in real-time” because scanning is carried out at the IDE and git level.

In its own blog post about the acquisition of the ETH Zurich spin-off, the university writes that the AI startup’s “decisive advantage” is that ‘it has developed the first AI system that can learn from billions of program codes quickly, enabling AI-​based detection of security and reliability code issues”.

“DeepCode is an excellent example of a modern AI system that can learn from data, program codes in this case, yet remain transparent and interpretable for humans,” it adds.

The university research work underpinning DeepCode dates back to 2013 — when its co-founders were figuring out how to combine data-​driven machine learning methods with semantic static code analysis methods based on symbolic reasoning, per the blog post.

DeepCode’s tech currently reaches more than 4M contributing developers, with more than 100,000 repositories subscribed to its service.