Checksum is building a continuous quality platform that helps companies safely ship software in an AI-driven world. Its products include the Continuous Quality Agent, API Testing Agent, and CI Guard, with a broader vision of providing quality assurance across the software development lifecycle as organizations move toward autonomous software delivery. Pulse 2.0 interviewed Checksum Co-Founder and CEO Gal Vered to learn more.
Gal Vered’s Background
When asked about his background, Vered shared:
I’m originally from Israel, where I served in the Israeli Navy for seven years. During the latter part of my service, I worked on deploying machine learning systems to support special operations. Afterward, I joined a technology startup focused on using machine learning to identify anomalies in maritime data, helping organizations detect activities such as illegal fishing, piracy, and oil theft.
That experience taught me both the technical side of machine learning and how to bridge the gap between customers and engineering teams. I later earned my master’s degree from Northwestern University’s Kellogg School of Management, interned at Lyft, and joined Google, where I led product initiatives focused on AI-powered consumer experiences across Google Assistant, Search, and Android.
After Google, I joined an early-stage startup before co-founding Checksum.
How Checksum Started
When asked how the idea for the company came together, Vered explained:
While at Google, I saw firsthand how powerful robust testing infrastructure could be. It was incredibly difficult for bugs to reach production, but maintaining that level of quality required significant resources. Large companies can afford that investment, but most startups are forced to choose between moving quickly or maintaining high confidence in their releases.
At the same time, I was working with transformer-based AI technologies and realized they could fundamentally change how software testing is done. The original vision was simple: observe how real users interact with applications, train models to understand those behaviors, and automatically test software the same way users would.
Today, with coding agents dramatically accelerating software development, the challenge has become even more important. Writing code is no longer the bottleneck. Verifying that code works correctly is.
Checksum exists to solve that problem and help companies confidently ship AI-generated code to production.
A Team Rallying Under Pressure
When asked about his favorite memory working at the company so far, Vered recalled:
One of my favorite memories involved a Fortune 100 customer that was evaluating our platform. They were one of our earliest enterprise customers, so the opportunity was incredibly important to us.
The day before a major review meeting, we discovered that a significant portion of the generated automation we had delivered wasn’t performing at the level we expected. Every last person on the team chose to stay until the issue was fixed. We ordered pizza and worked through the night.
The next day, the customer loved what they saw, but more than that, the experience reinforced what I love most about startups: seeing an entire team rally together to solve a difficult problem under pressure.
Core Products And Features
When asked about the company’s core products and features, Vered detailed:
Checksum is building a continuous quality platform designed to help companies safely ship software in an AI-driven world.
We currently offer three primary solutions:
- Continuous Quality Agent: An end-to-end testing platform that simulates real-world production usage and verifies that applications behave correctly.
- API Testing Agent: A solution that automatically validates APIs across an organization’s systems.
- CI Guard: An agent that tests individual code changes with hundreds of targeted validations before deployment.
Our broader vision is to provide quality assurance throughout the entire software development lifecycle, enabling organizations to move toward fully autonomous software delivery.
Keeping Pace With AI
When asked about recent challenges in the sector and how Checksum has addressed them, Vered noted:
The pace of change in AI is both exciting and challenging. The capabilities available today are dramatically different from what existed when we started the company.
Features that felt magical a year ago can become standard functionality almost overnight. That means we constantly have to stay at the forefront of innovation and ensure we’re delivering meaningful improvements for customers.
One way we address this is by being our own power users. We use AI extensively across engineering, sales, marketing, and operations. Solving our own challenges often gives us early insight into the problems our customers will face several months later.
Technology Evolution
When asked how the company’s technology has evolved since launch, Vered explained:
Our vision has expanded significantly since launch. Initially, we focused on automatically generating tests by observing user behavior.
Today, we’re building a broader platform that supports autonomous software delivery. As AI-generated code becomes more common, organizations need verification systems that can operate across every stage of development, from code generation through deployment and monitoring.
Our products have evolved from standalone testing tools into a coordinated system of quality agents designed to ensure software works correctly before it reaches customers.
Major Company Milestones
When asked about some of the company’s most significant milestones, Vered cited:
One milestone was simply reaching the point where our team had grown so much that we could no longer fit everyone into our conference room without bringing in extra chairs.
Another was seeing our growth metrics evolve to the point where we had to redesign our internal dashboards to accommodate significantly larger usage and revenue figures.
On the product side, a major milestone came with the launch of our newest QA agent. Tasks that previously took months of manual effort can now be completed in a fraction of the time, dramatically accelerating software validation for customers.
Customer Success
When asked to share a specific customer success story, Vered highlighted:
One of our customers operates in the insurance industry, where even small software errors can have significant financial consequences.
They use Checksum to maintain confidence in their releases while continuing to move quickly. Our platform regularly catches critical issues before they reach production and has helped eliminate production outages while supporting faster software delivery.
For organizations adopting AI-powered development workflows, maintaining quality becomes increasingly important. Customers tell us that Checksum significantly amplifies the effectiveness of their QA teams and enables them to scale development without sacrificing reliability.
Revenue Growth
When asked about funding and revenue metrics, Vered shared:
Over the last 12 months, we’ve grown revenue approximately 8x as demand for AI-powered software quality solutions continues to increase.
Market Opportunity
When discussing the total addressable market Checksum is pursuing, Vered explained:
We view our opportunity through the lens of autonomous software development.
As organizations increasingly rely on AI to generate code, they will need equally sophisticated systems to verify, test, and safely deploy that code. We believe software quality and verification will become a critical component of every AI-powered development workflow.
As a result, we see our market opportunity as closely tied to the future of software development itself.
Competitive Differentiation
When asked what differentiates Checksum from competitors, Vered emphasized:
Most solutions focus on individual parts of the testing process.
Our approach is broader. We believe organizations need a comprehensive system of quality agents that operate across the entire software development lifecycle. You’re only as strong as your weakest link, and fully autonomous software delivery requires confidence at every stage.
We’re building that end-to-end quality infrastructure, enabling organizations to move faster without increasing risk.
Future Goals
When discussing Checksum’s future goals, Vered said:
Our primary goal is to expand our footprint across the software development lifecycle and help organizations safely adopt autonomous software delivery.
We want Checksum to be involved whenever software is built, tested, deployed, monitored, or updated. As AI increases development velocity, we believe quality assurance will become one of the most important challenges organizations face.
We also intend to continue our growth trajectory while helping customers spend less time firefighting production issues and more time building great products.
The Future Of Software Simulation
When invited to discuss another topic, Vered concluded:
One area we’re particularly excited about is the future of software simulation.
The autonomous vehicle industry relies heavily on simulation environments that allow companies to test millions of scenarios before deploying systems in the real world. We believe software development is heading in a similar direction.
In the future, organizations will use sophisticated runtime simulations and “code world models” to test software across countless scenarios before deployment. We see that capability as a foundational requirement for truly autonomous software engineering, and it’s a core part of the future we’re building at Checksum.
