Ventrilo.AI - Dev's Quality Partner

The Newest Rain Investment

I can’t believe it is June already, the midway point of the year. And with that, we are thrilled to welcome our newest investment, Ventrilo.ai, to the Rain family.

I got to know Andy Chou, the founder of Ventrilo, from the days of Coverity. I still remember the first time I met the Coverity team, when they came to brief me and discussed using Boolean Satisfiability for program analysis.

“Satisfiability!” I exclaimed.

I had just left my faculty job at Carnegie Mellon University. Someone talking about NT-completeness in a product was like music to my ears. Andy and his co-founders were from the same tribe as me — we care deeply about technology and the problems that make technology fun.

In the ensuing years, Coverity matured and so did I. I went from a young technologist to a product executive and along the way developed a deep appreciation to what it is like to build a product vs. a piece of technology.

Coverity was a success story. However, it was not without challenges. The founders wrote about their learnings in an article “A Few Billion Lines of Code Later: Using Static Analysis to Find Bugs in the Real World” in the Communication of ACM.

For example, this was a conversation with a customer prospect:

[Customer]: “How do I run your tool?”

[Coverity]: “Oh, it’s easy. Just type ‘cov-build’ before your build command.”

[Cusotmer]: “Build command? I just push this [GUI] button...”

I literally fell off my chair laughing. This, to me, captures perfectly the gap between what technologists thought the customer wanted and what the customer actually wants. Other learnings include finding the maximum number of errors is not always the best thing; finding errors that people can do something about is far better, etc., etc.

All jokes aside, the “A Few Billion Lines of Code Later” article mirrors many of the learnings that I had as I transitioned from an academic researcher to industry operator and finally to an investor.

I learned that founders who wakes up everyday obsessed with building a product that truly solves customers’ problems are the people that you want to bet on.

So when Andy talked to me about his idea of “Ventrilo” — leveraging AI to model how humans interact with applications and use that for program testing and quality. I got excited not only because the idea is novel, but also I know that Andy will be building this not only for the “coolness” of the tech, but also from the product delivery point of view.

Since I started discussing with Andy, Ventrilo moved quickly; the team grew, more world-class talent joined, many investors came to the table, and soon enough, a $10 million seed round took shape.

Andreeseen’s Martin Casado let the round, with participations from us, super angels Elad Gil and Lachy Groom. Bloomberg Beta and Conviction are also part of the round.

Rain is elated that we are part of Ventrilo’s journey. A few weeks ago, we met the young company, as a whole, in Palo Alto. I walked away from that meeting energized and ready to change the world.

If you are as excited about Ventrilo as I am, they are hiring and you can help spread the word. If you want to push the boundaries of LLM-based systems, browser automation, graph algorithms, and serverless architecture, and have a passion to create groundbreaking solutions for complex problems, send resumes here.