Diffblue, a spin-out company from the University of Oxford, has raised $22m in Series A funding.
The round was led by Goldman Sachs Principal Strategy Investments and drew participation from Oxford Sciences Innovations (OSI), and the Oxford Technology and Innovations Fund (OTIF).
Diffblue is the result of a decade’s worth of research and is applying AI to software development.
According to TechCrunch, the company says its AI is able to create an exact mathematical model for any code base, after receiving just a few examples to work from.
Daniel Kroening, the founder and a professor of computer science at Oxford University, told TechCrunch he believed the firm’s artificial intelligence will eventually be smart enough to create entire computer programs by itself.
Additionally, Kroening spoke about the seeming shortage of software developers and commented he didn’t think society would ever produce sufficient numbers. It’s for this reason, he added, that AI can help.
Diffblue, which left the world of academia 12 months ago, is working on a series of products including a testing facility that will seek to spot bugs and write tests; and a refactoring tool that will pick up faulty code ‘on the fly’.
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