Silber named chair of Diffblue

Diffblue said April 18 that it named Jane Silber as the firm’s chair of the board. Silber was most recently CEO of Canonical.

PRESS RELEASE

London, 18 April 2017 – Diffblue, the Oxford-based world leader in AI for code, today announces that Jane Silber has been appointed Chair of the Board of Directors. Silber was most recently CEO of Canonical, the company behind Ubuntu – the marketing-leading Linux based operating system, where she remains on the board as a non-executive director. Silber has unrivalled experience in running and managing open-source software enterprises globally.

She was a member of the Canonical executive team since the company’s founding, serving as both COO and CEO, and as such helped lead the company through stages of product adoption, commercial growth, and organisational development. She also serves on the board of The Sensible Code Company, a platform for analysing and extracting data from public sources, on the board of Open Knowledge International, a global non-profit that promotes open data, and on the Board of Managers of Haverford College, a leading liberal arts college in Pennsylvania, USA.

As Chair of Diffblue’s Board of Directors, Silber will oversee the strategic and commercial direction of Diffblue and will support CEO Daniel Kroening as the company continues its product development and commercialisation efforts.

The news follows Diffblue’s announcement in July last year that it closed a $22 million funding round led by Goldman Sachs Principal Strategic Investments and Oxford Sciences Innovation. Diffblue is currently developing a code generation product that automatically writes test code for both legacy and current codebases; a security product that automatically flags up exploitable bugs and generates tests for those bugs; and a refactoring product that rewrites badly expressed or out of date code.

Daniel Kroening, CEO, Diffblue, said: “Jane brings a wealth of experience and is one of the most well-respected figures in the technology industry. She joins Diffblue at a pivotal moment in its growth as we prepare to launch two new products into the market. Her expertise and guidance will be invaluable as we continue to scale.”

Jane Silber added: “Diffblue is such an exciting company – a best-in-class product built by top-notch talent, software at the intersection of pure and pragmatic AI, and great market potential. I’m looking forward to being part of a company which will bring real change to software development practices and enterprise IT.”

ENDS

About Diffblue

Founded by Daniel Kroening, Professor of Computer Science at the University of Oxford, and Dr. Peter Schrammel, Diffblue uses cutting-edge AI technology to help software developers increase productivity and focus on creating exciting, high-quality software.

Diffblue is a world leader in automated test-generation with products developed over the last 10 years alongside its partners. Diffblue’s first product automates the manual process of writing tests. Ultimately, the company’s vision is to design code that can write itself.

Today Diffblue’s tools are available for C and Java and other languages are currently being developed.