Austin-based software development company Sonar is adding another artificial intelligence platform to its portfolio. The company, which specializes in AI code verification, has acquired Gitar, saying it will integrate seamlessly with its SonarQube platform.
"(Most) committed code is now AI-generated or AI-assisted, and the review workflows built for human-paced development can’t absorb the volume,” said Lexie Gunther, a Sonar spokesperson. “Engineering teams are drowning in pull requests, CI failures and false positives. Senior engineers are debugging pipelines instead of shipping products.”
California-based Gitar emerged with a $9 million funding round in April. It was founded by Ali-Reza Adl-Tabatabai, a veteran of Intel Labs, Google and Uber. Sonar plans to incorporate all Gitar employees, including its leaders Adl-Tabatabai and Gautam Korlam, whom Sonar said helped build Uber’s centralized developer platform.
Terms of the acquisition were not disclosed.
Sonar provides AI tools for developers but does not develop AI systems itself. The billion-dollar company, which now has more than 200 employees in Austin, works with clients such as Microsoft Corp., Johnson & Johnson, NASA, T-Mobile US Inc. and the U.S. Department of Defense.
CEO Tariq Shaukat has said his company’s goal is to improve the quality and security of developers’ work as more computer coding is being done by AI. He began working with Sonar about five years ago while he was president of Austin-based dating app Bumble. In May 2023, he stepped down from his role at Bumble and became Sonar CEO that September.
Gitar is the second major AI acquisition for Sonar in the past two years. In February 2025, it acquired AutoCodeRover, an AI platform developed by researchers at the National University of Singapore to aid with software development debugging.