Itamar Friedman

Itamar Friedman is co-founder and CEO of Qodo, formerly CodiumAI, which builds AI tools for code review, testing, and code quality. He spent about 20 years managing research and development before starting it in 2022.

Running a Company as a Teenager

Friedman had his first company as a teenager, with about 30 clients and a dozen employees, he said on the Stack Overflow podcast. His first employee, Dedy Kredo, is now his co-founder at Qodo. He studied electrical engineering, then worked on verification at Mellanox, which became part of Nvidia. Realizing that many tedious processes there could be automated with machine learning, he switched to optimization and machine learning and completed a master's degree, he told Unite.AI.

Scanning QR Codes at Visualead

His first startup was, in his words, "a great ride, amazing growth, but also a beautiful collapse." The next one, Visualead, scanned logos and QR codes and had been running models on mobile devices since 2012. Alibaba Group acquired it. Friedman then started Alibaba's research and development center in Tel Aviv, Israel, and spent four years there. At Alibaba, he said, he saw how a bug in code could become a million-dollar problem.

Leaving Alibaba to Start CodiumAI

By 2021, working with large language and vision models, he concluded, as he told the Stack Overflow podcast, that "if you're able to frame a problem as a language, then AI could take you very far." He left Alibaba at the beginning of 2022 and started CodiumAI in the middle of that year. He has said the later name Qodo, with a Q, is meant to emphasize quality of development, on the TestGuild podcast.