GitHub CEO Thomas Dohmke stepped down a few months ago. He’s getting back into the arena now.
Dohmke was just tapped as a strategic advisor to Apiiro, a startup that helps organizations monitor the security of their apps and codebases.
He’ll focus on helping Apiiro develop new protections for AI-generated software code.
As more AI coding tools churn out code, there’s concern that this could make codebases more vulnerable to hacks and other cybersecurity risks.
Dohmke said developers now often use multiple AI coding agents, and these tools don’t necessarily know all the policies, rules, and safeguards that their employers have set up to ensure their codebases and broader technology offerings are secure.
Apiiro’s technology connects with companies’ code-management systems, providing this crucial context for AI code generation, he said.
“That’s the important part,” Dohmke added, adding that Apiiro can spot and automatically fix such issues in code, helping developers comply with company guidelines, while not piling on more work for them to do.
Apiiro has raised more than $100 million from investors, including General Catalyst, Greylock, and Kleiner Perkins. CEO Idan Plotnik has launched and sold other startups in the past and has served as a cybersecurity executive at Microsoft.
Dohmke also comes from Microsoft, which owns GitHub. He said he met Plotnik about three years ago and was taken by the CEO’s energy and Apiiro’s mission.
Of course, the former head of GitHub has a lot of choices for what to do next. And while Dohmke gets a portion of Apiiro for his advisory services, he said he’s more interested in what Apiiro is building.
As more employees use AI to develop digital products and prototypes, the startup’s technology should become even more useful, he said.
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