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&Truth launches with $70 million to automate formal software verification
Wired reports Stanford researcher Chuyue Sun joined &Truth, which launched Thursday after raising $70 million, as startups bet AI can make mathematical proofs of software more practical.
- New headline Was: “The ‘Pain in the Ass’ Math That Could Save Vibe Coding From Itself”
- Our desk filed its story
Formal-verification startup &Truth launched Thursday after raising $70 million, Wired reported, as several companies bet generative AI can make mathematical proofs of software cheaper and more widely used1.
Stanford researcher Chuyue Sun joined &Truth in August, according to Wired1. Sun reported in a recent paper that an AI tool completed an engineering project in less than half a day for under $500, compared with five months of work by three experts1. Wired said her research included using AI to verify part of the code that encrypts conversations in Signal1.
Formal verification uses math to prove software behaves as specified, a process companies have long treated as too slow and expensive for most code, Wired reported1. Ilya Sergey, &Truth’s chief science officer, told Wired that people use math before building bridges and asked why the same is not done for code1. The company aims eventually to verify any programming language, according to the report1.
Rival Harmonic, cofounded by Robinhood chief executive Vlad Tenev and funded with $295 million, announced this week that its math-focused AI agent Aristotle can verify software written in C and hardware designs in Verilog, Wired reported1. Wired said Harmonic is evaluating the technology with potential users including chipmakers Tensordyne and Nvidia, whose venture arm is an investor1.
Last week Anthropic and verification startup Theorem jointly announced they had used AI to help find bugs in open-source software that trillions of tests had failed to detect, and they introduced an add-on for Claude, Wired reported1. Costs of that project were not disclosed1.
Wired said Boeing planes, Amazon servers and more than 2.5 billion active Apple devices contain at least some formally verified software, typically in security-related code1. Amazon Web Services vice president Byron Cook said the technique has eased customer concerns about cloud security and helped teams find large bugs earlier1. Apple’s security team said earlier this year that some issues found in its corecrypto library could not have been found another way, while adding it must be conservative when adding new code1.
Several midsized companies told Wired they typically verified only one key feature, if any, citing a shortage of specialists, cost and delays of weeks1. Will Wilson of bug-hunting startup Antithesis called formal verification a trap, said Antithesis spent millions verifying some defenses and still found more errors, and told Wired only exhaustive testing can prove assurance is true1. Ethereum cofounder Vitalik Buterin wrote earlier this year that formal verification is not a panacea, Wired reported1.
Wired said the technology is still in prototyping and that it is unclear how much customers will pay1. Former Microsoft Research scientist Madan Musuvathi founded Truidic after more than 20 years at Microsoft, citing urgency after incidents such as a reported OpenAI-related Hugging Face hack1. Proofcraft, a longer-running verification firm, said inquiries are rising faster than supply, while its leaders warned AI-generated specifications could create unjustified trust1.
