Top 10 questions to source{d} CEO: Eiso Kant
With the recent release of source{d} Engine and source{d} Lookout, we’ve been getting a lot of questions from users, partners, prospects, investors, journalists, and analysts. In this blog post, our CEO Eiso Kant answers the top 10 frequently asked questions to clarify many aspects of source{d}’s business and technology stack. Don’t hesitate to ask additional questions in the comments if this blog post does not include the answers you were looking for.
- How big is source{d} and where are you based out of?
While the company was historically launched in Madrid, we’re now a fully remote company with its main headquarters in San Francisco, California. The company has over 40 employees worldwide represented by 12 nationalities. Employees are mostly based in the USA, Spain, France, and Russia. There has been a 50% YoY growth in headcount, mostly in western Europe and the U.S. We’ve raised $10 million from Otium, Sunstone Capital, Xaviel Niel, and others.
2. Why should companies care about source{d}?
Companies focused on modernizing their application portfolio, getting rid of technical debt, and embracing open source software development and DevOps best practices will find source{d} extremely valuable. It is designed to give engineering managers the visibility and tooling they need to measure progress and identify bottlenecks with regard to key digital transformation initiatives, while helping developers respect IT guidelines and ship higher quality code, more quickly.
3. Is the source{d} stack open source?
At source{d} we have created a suite of 20+ open source projects under the GNU General Public License v3.0, Apache 2.0 and Affero GPL v3.0 licenses. All these projects have been packaged up in two open source products available under an Apache 2.0 license: source{d} Engine, for large scale code analysis and source{d} Lookout for assisted code review. We are great believers in open source and its philosophy. Not only is our source code developed out in the open and made available to all, but also our culture, guides, and even OKRs are openly accessible on GitHub.
4. How do you plan to build a sustainable business if everything is Open Source?
Everything that runs on a single machine or “node” is fully open sourced and available on the permissive licenses mentioned above. Anything that needs to run over a data set that needs more processing power than a single machine, requires source{d} Enterprise edition which is currently in private beta. This edition also offers additional Enterprise features such as RBAC, additional data sources, Spark/Hive integration and more.
5. Is the company profitable or are you planning to raise another round of funding?
We’re planning on raising another round of funding to grow our sales and customer success departments to handle interest from Fortune 500 companies, currently mostly in the finance and telecommunication industries. Until now enterprise customers have been engaged in minimum of five figures paid proof of concepts. We expect these to be followed up by six to seven figures annual enterprise deals once we officially release our Enterprise edition to the public later this year.
6. What is the profile/size of companies who can benefit the most from source{d} products?
Large enterprises with thousands of engineers are the ones which can benefit the most from the source{d} platform as a key component of their digital transformation and IT management initiatives. Whether they are focused on embracing DevOps or Innersource best practices or going Cloud Native, source{d} can help monitor progress, enforce guidelines retroactively and prevent guidelines violations.
7. Who are your competitors?
While we are defining a new category to a certain extent, we’re competing with SonarSource on static source code analysis, with Semmle on some security vulnerability analysis and GitPrime on extracting actionable insights from software development processes and platforms such as GitHub, GitLab and Atlassian Bitbucket.
8. How is source{d} different from SonarQube?
source{d} Engine is different from SonarQube in the ways it performs flexible source code analysis and converts your source code into three different data formats. The first one is called universal abstract syntax trees (UASTs) to perform language-agnostic analysis regardless of language specific constructs. The second is native analysis for specific aspects of the language that isn’t represented in the UASTs. Finally, we provide a higher level of abstraction that enables advanced SQL queries and integration into enterprise business intelligence platforms such as Tableau, Looker or PowerBI. While SonarQube is a more polished static analysis product, source{d} gives you the raw power to easily analyze what you care about across your source code, version control system and other software development life cycle data sources.
9. How does source{d} Lookout compare to Microsoft Intellisense?
Developers can benefit from Microsoft Intellisense as they write code, they do not need to leave the editor to perform searches on language elements, insert language elements directly into their code, etc. With source{d} Lookout we provide value to developers when they are actually looking for feedback, at the code review stage, when submitting pull/merge requests.
10. Where does source{d} fit in the IT landscape?
source{d} provides solutions for what Gartner calls AI-Driven Development, Augmented Analytics and the concept of Digital Twins. At source{d}, we use the concepts of “Code as Data” and “Machine Learning on Code” to refer to these trends. In other words, we provide one data platform for your software development life cycle and enable the use of machine learning techniques for large scale source code analysis and software development.
Learn more about source{d}:
- Watch source{d} Engine in 5 minutes video
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- Sign up for our upcoming Online Meetup
- Join the source{d} Community Slack
