Gitar Launches from Stealth with $9M as AI-Generated Code Outpaces Teams' Ability to Validate and Ship Software Safely

Former Uber developer platform leaders launch AI agents that automate pull request validation and actively resolve code review and CI triage issues

SAN FRANCISCO, April 15, 2026 /PRNewswire/ -- Gitar, a developer infrastructure company building AI agents for code review and continuous integration workflows, today emerged from stealth and announced $9 million in funding led by Venrock with participation from Sierra Ventures.

AI has dramatically accelerated how quickly code can be written. Copilots, vibe coding, and autonomous coding agents are generating more pull requests than engineering teams can realistically review, test, and release safely. As a result, the bottleneck in software development is shifting from writing code to validating it.

Most organizations are responding by adding more tools, more scanners, and more manual oversight of CI pipelines. But this creates a lose-lose situation: teams that push code through without thorough validation see incidents and regressions rise. Teams that slow down to review everything see velocity and developer sentiment crater. Either way, the bottleneck compounds as AI-generated code volume grows.

"The industry has focused on accelerating code generation, but the real constraint is shipping that code safely," said Ali-Reza Adl-Tabatabai, co-founder and CEO of Gitar. "Developers today spend too much time acting as the integration layer between CI failures, logs, fixes, and approvals. Gitar turns that process into an autonomous system that reviews and quality checks code, triages problems, diagnoses root causes, and proposes fixes so engineers can focus on delivering software."

From Manual Quality Gates to Agentic Validation

In modern software pipelines, every change must pass through a validation phase before reaching production. This process typically involves manual code review, CI test results, security scans, and approvals from multiple engineers.

As AI-generated code increases, these manual quality gates become a scaling problem. Larger pull requests, higher change throughput, and inconsistent code quality create growing pressure on developers responsible for validating changes. Platform teams, typically under-resourced, absorb the growing support burden without additional headcount. The result: senior engineers become pipeline janitors, review quality erodes as teams rubber-stamp to keep up, and CI failures pile up faster than anyone can diagnose them.

Gitar addresses this challenge by introducing agentic quality gates, which are AI systems that automate the workflows involved in pull request validation.

Key capabilities of the Gitar platform include:

• AI code review: Detects bugs and vulnerabilities and surfaces high-signal findings
• CI failure root-cause analysis: De-duplicates and summarizes CI failures to identify the underlying issue
• Automated fixes: Generates code changes to address CI failures or review findings
• Interactive agent: Allows developers to query, update, and fix code directly inside pull or merge requests
• Custom agents: Enables engineering platform teams to create custom agents for automating validation workflows
• Developer workflow integrations: Connects with tools including GitHub, GitLab, Slack, Jira, Linear, CircleCI, Buildkite, and Jenkins
• Workflow analytics: Tracks validation outcomes, CI failures, and agent decisions to identify recurring issues and opportunities to improve development workflows, helping platform teams steadily improve CI reliability and code quality.

Together, these capabilities allow engineering teams to move from manually triaging pipeline failures to receiving approval-ready decisions about whether code is ready to merge.

Built for the Era of AI-Generated Code

While most AI coding tools focus on generating code inside the IDE, Gitar targets the stage where that code must be validated before release.

The platform integrates directly with GitHub and GitLab workflows and supports common CI systems such as CircleCI, Buildkite, and Jenkins. It also connects with developer tools including Slack, Jira, and Linear, allowing teams to automate validation workflows across their existing development environments.

Gitar enables both developers and platform teams to automate complex validation workflows. Platform teams can also create custom agents using natural-language prompts to enforce company-specific checks, policies, and CI automations.

Built by the Team Behind Uber's Developer Platform

Gitar was founded by Ali-Reza Adl-Tabatabai and Gautam Korlam, who previously worked together at Uber, where they helped build the company's centralized developer platform organization. In those roles, they led initiatives to modernize development workflows, improve CI reliability, and increase engineering velocity across large-scale, mission-critical codebases.

Ali-Reza also brings extensive executive and technical leadership experience from Google, Facebook, and Intel, where he led advanced engineering and platform teams at global scale. He is a renowned researcher, having published more than 40 academic papers, and is an inventor on over 90 patents spanning software and hardware systems for performance and productivity.

Gautam brings more than a decade of experience in developer infrastructure, most recently serving as a Principal Engineer on Uber's Developer Platform team. His expertise spans build systems, CI/CD, and IDE tooling, and he has contributed to open source projects adopted by leading engineering organizations including Square, Airbnb, and Lyft.

That firsthand experience scaling developer infrastructure and software delivery at one of the world's largest engineering organizations led the founders to a clear conviction: the future of software development will be shaped by autonomous validation systems that enable teams to innovate faster with greater confidence in what they ship.

"We invest in teams who have a deep, firsthand understanding of the problems they're solving, and Gitar is a strong example of that," said Ganesh Srinivasan, Partner at Venrock. "Ali-Reza and Gautam have spent years building and scaling developer platforms at companies like Uber, Google, and Facebook, and they've seen how quickly validation becomes the limiting factor. They're uniquely positioned to build the infrastructure layer that makes AI-driven development actually work in production."

Customer Traction and Testimonials

Already, Gitar serves dozens of enterprise and high-growth companies, including Revyl, XFactor.io, SoFi, Cadence, Sphinx, and more.

"We started using Gitar two weeks ago and have been blown away by how in-depth the code review agent is," said Landseer Renga, Co-founder of Revyl. "Gautam Korlam and his team are competing in one of the most crowded spaces, yet their product stands out. Check it out."

"What stood out to us about Gitar right away was how little noise it adds to GitHub," said KJ Nouri, Head of Technology at XFactor.io. "It doesn't clutter pull requests or flood them with generic bot comments, and it keeps reviews up to date as the code changes without adding more UI noise. It's also very easy to interact with directly from the PR, which makes it feel lightweight rather than intrusive."

"Gitar has dramatically shortened our time to merge in our mobile CI by quickly identifying CI failures, quality issues, and vulnerabilities, and providing insightful and useful AI-powered remediations," said Phil Rabin, Director of Engineering, Mobile at SoFi. "Our engineers love the ability to take action directly on their MRs without having to return to their local branches."

About Gitar
Gitar is a developer infrastructure company building AI agents that automate code review and continuous integration workflows. For more information, visit https://gitar.ai/

SOURCE Gitar