When Itamar Friedman, ex-Nvidia and ex-Alibaba, and Dedy Kredo founded their new startup for the emerging world of AI, they called it Codium.
Their goal was to appeal to companies that use automated software code generators - the companies using Claude Code, GitHub, Copilot, Cognition, or Cursor, to develop software. These companies wanted a product that could ensure that their use of code generators would be safe and relatively error-free. After Friedman spent years developing AI-based testing tools at Nvidia in the pre-AI era and later at Alibaba, he and Kredo felt a need to bring similar tools to the world of software.
Codium won fame in Silicon Valley. AI guru Andrej Karpathy, now a senior executive at Anthropic, praised one of the articles published by Codium in its early stages, while Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang mentioned the company in one of his speeches.
At the same time, however, another company with the same name appeared. When a JP Morgan executive called to find out which of the two Codiums Friedman and Kredo were working at, they decided to change their company's name to Qodo. "The American Codium became Windsurf - now one of the world's largest automated code generators," the two entrepreneurs say with a shrug.
New name, big success
Under its new name, Qodo is achieving commercial success and positioning itself as the Wiz or Datadog of the automated code sector, according to CEO Itamar Friedman. His company enables customers of Anthropic, OpenAI, and Cursor to ensure that the code that they generate is safe and reliable. "Code generators are becoming the new software manufacturers and companies like Qodo will be tomorrow's code monitors, just as Wiz and Datadog provide a similar product for the cloud," he says.
With customers like Nvidia, Ford, Red Hat, monday.com, and a number of government customers, Qodo's revenue growth suddenly skyrocketed. Industry sources (unconfirmed by the company) estimate Qodo's revenue last year at less than $10 million. This year, however, the company expects $30 million revenue or more, with transaction size leaping from tens of thousands to hundreds of thousands or even millions of dollars.
A single agreement signed last month by Qodo totaled a cool $5 million. "The amount of code really written by code generators within companies is exaggerated," Friedman says. "Young startups can have 95% of their code written by Claude Code, Cursor, or GitHub. When you see an old retail chain with thousands of branches, however, the code generators are responsible for no more than 15% or 20% of the code being written at the company."
These giant companies are introducing the automated code tool, while at the same time demanding that someone should scan the code for them, examine it, and monitor its operation to make sure that there are no mishaps. Qodo is one of the beneficiaries of this development.
Qodo, of course, is not alone in the market - CodeRabbit from California and Grafana compete with it. Furthermore, some of these companies choose to invest major resources in developing their own code generators, which is likely to divert them from their original missions. In addition, Anthropic's Claude Code and OpenAI's Codex are developing similar tools, but Friedman is unconcerned.
Anthropic, Microsoft, and Cursor are not the only players in Qodo's growing market. "We believed that there would be many code generators, not just one," Friedman explains, "and ours was a minority opinion. Some thought that Copilot would dominate the software market - until Cursor arrived, followed by Claude Code. The market is now quite widely dispersed.
"Nvidia asked us to maintain uniform standards for them for all of these generators. Just this month, they were joined by companies like Qualcomm and Starbucks," Friedman comments
Year founded: 2022
Capital raised: $120 million
Employees: 129, 70 in Israel
Investors: TLV Partners, Square Peg Capital, Susa Ventures, Qumra Capital, Phoenix Capital Partners, Maor Ventures, Vine Ventures
Published by Globes, Israel business news - en.globes.co.il - on June 17, 2026.
© Copyright of Globes Publisher Itonut (1983) Ltd., 2026.