In 2009, we began building FoundationDB — a strongly-consistent, highly-available distributed database that most experts thought impossible. At the time, it was one of the most ambitious distributed systems ever attempted. We knew that conventional testing approaches would leave it impossibly bug-ridden.

So before writing the database itself, we invented a deterministic simulation framework that could find and perfectly reproduce even the subtlest bugs. It worked! Despite our breakneck development speed, we only shipped one user-reported bug before Apple acquired FoundationDB in 2015.

After the acquisition, our team dispersed into many big tech companies — and we were shocked to find that nothing like our simulation framework existed anywhere else. The most sophisticated engineering organizations on Earth were losing months to production bugs that our approach would have caught in hours. Worse, their fear of outages made them unbearably slow.

In 2018, Will Wilson and Dave Scherer reunited to found Antithesis. Their mission was simple: to bring the superpower of deterministic simulation testing to every mission-critical software project.