Early is a Tel Aviv-based startup that uses generative AI to generate unit tests to help programmers find potential bugs early in the development cycle. Founded in August, the company today announced that it has raised a $5 million seed round led by Zeev Ventures with participation from Dynamic Loop Capital.
In its current form, Early supports JavaScript and TypeScript and is integrated with the Visual Studio Code IDE. From there, developers can quickly see how much of their code is covered by tests and automatically generate verified tests from within the IDE. The company says these tests include mocks and are intended to cover various scenarios that developers would need to manually code, such as happy paths and edge cases.
While the current focus is on helping developers write unit tests, Early CEO and co-founder Sharon Barr said the overall mission is much broader. In an interview ahead of today's announcement, Barr emphasized that he does not consider Early to be a testing company. “I like to call us a code quality company,” he said.
Image credit: Early
Code quality is something Barr knows a lot about. Prior to founding Early, he served as VP of Engineering at Couchbase from 2010 to 2013 and later became CTO of biotech company Bina. Bina was subsequently acquired by Roche, and Barr held the role of Vice President of Software Engineering until 2018. He then joined EYGlobal, reporting to the CTO and holding a number of leadership roles.
His co-founder and chief technology officer, Lior Froimovic, was head of engineering at EY Global, the role in which Barr hired him, and previously co-founded two startups.
“A year ago, I left EY along with my co-founder Lior, who I hired six years ago, and we said, ‘Okay, let’s see what we can do with this new and exciting GenAI technology. The problem we've faced in our careers is code quality,'' Barr told me. “And we said, 'Okay, let's start testing.'” Let's see if we can generate some code for testing. In the world of testing, let's start with unit tests. We tried it out. We were ultimately able to raise funding from Zeev Ventures much sooner than expected and have been focused on the product ever since. ”
Image credit: Early
Barr, like most AI startup founders I talk to these days, doesn't think AI or AI agents will replace humans anytime soon. But he believes services like Early allow developers to focus on the more creative parts of coding.
“Early teams are at the forefront of this revolution because they deeply understand both the potential of AI and the nuances of software development,” said Oren Zeev, founder of Zeev Ventures. Masu. “They're not just using AI; they're applying it strategically to solve one of the most persistent and costly challenges in coding. We believe this tool will significantly reduce the time and cost of detecting and fixing bugs, and ultimately accelerate innovation across the technology industry.”