New tech start-up, p0, announced that it has successfully secured a seed funding round of $6.5m from Lightspeed Venture Partners, supplemented with involvement from Alchemy Ventures. This funding marks p0's emergence from stealth, bringing their innovative approach to software testing and reliability under the spotlight.
The term p0 in tech language refers to a nuclear-level event that can cause a platform to crash. This startup is helping tech teams find and eliminate these events when developers are writing code - a pertinent issue in an age where around 71% of software engineers have shown concern about software reliability in their workplace.
The uniqueness of p0's approach lies in its merger of two traditionally separate testing methods: the "black box" approach utilising external security solutions or white hat hackers, and the method of having internal developers familiar with the system undertake the testing.
The team at p0 combines these approaches using Large Language Models (LLM) allowing them to understand systems purely by scanning the code. This integration allows them to pose more sophisticated and real-world challenges to vital software, flagging latent vulnerabilities that could have incredibly harmful effects if exploited.
p0's proprietary technology, powered by LLM, is designed to identify potential safety and security issues before the software enters a production environment. Their technique offers a one-click solution that requires no additional configuration from the user. It takes on a varying range of software issues, including data integrity and validation failures that could compromise data security, and even speed and timeout cases.
Co-Founder and CTO of p0, Prakash Sanker, underlines the company's mission, "Across the world, recent catastrophic software failures have led to real-world impact on human life and poor outcomes for businesses. We are determined to stop these safety and security issues affecting our society. Leveraging AI, we can go further than traditional software reliability and security tools to ensure society sees the benefits of technology with less risk."
Kunal Agarwal, Co-Founder and CEO of p0, shares the sentiment and added, "We're building a phenomenal team and product at p0, all focused around protecting our clients and their users from the damage that software vulnerabilities and reliability bugs can cause. As software becomes more intricate and pervasive, the importance of robust testing and reliability checks has never been more apparent."
The freshly secured funding will be channelled towards further product development and to foster wider adoption from users while building their team further.
Hemant Mohapatra, Partner at Lightspeed, believes in the potential of p0, stating, "p0's cutting-edge approach to code and API security is unique and amongst the first-ever truly LLM-native ways of solving this age-old and ever-evolving problem. We are excited to have incubated and backed them from when this was just an idea on paper."