2006: Started a side project at Oxford. 2011: NASA used it to find bugs in their Mars rover. 2019: Sold to Microsoft and became GitHub Advanced Security. Semmle was a query engine for source code, and its killer application was finding security bugs in code. In particular, if you already knew of a vulnerability, it allowed you to write a query to find all variants of that bug. We'd go to a big company and ask them to show us 3 bad security bugs they’d had before, then we’d come back to them with 10 variants they didn’t know existed. Only 5 years after launch, Semmle helped NASA ensure the safe landing of the Curiosity Mars rover. Semmle found 33 undetected variants of a bug in the landing software (remember the “seven minutes of terror”?) while the rover was still on its way to Mars. NASA patched them, and the rover landed safely. In 2018, we raised a $21 million Series B from Accel. By that point, many large banks and big tech companies had become customers. By 2019, Microsoft, which owned GitHub, was our biggest customer. So when it came to the acquisition, GitHub felt like the natural home for Semmle. The culture fit was great, and the integration went very smoothly. The day the deal closed, I announced it at our weekly Friday all-hands in Oxford. It was a deeply emotional moment: the team fought together for 13 years, side-by-side. The team were my friends, and the company had become part of my own identity. That’s why, when I'm asked what I learned from the acquisition, I tell people it's super important to choose a good home for your team and your product. You spend years nurturing and growing a company, so if you decide to sell, make sure the people and product you love will thrive. I couldn't have wished for a better home for Semmle than GitHub. The product was renamed GitHub Advanced Security (specifically CodeQL), and it became wildly popular thanks to the commercial efforts of Niroshan and team. Our security researchers became the core of GitHub Security Lab. Many of the engineering team stayed around at GitHub, proving that indeed it was a good home for us all. For me, working with people I admire is my greatest professional joy. Today Nico is our CISO at XBOW, and Niroshan leads our GTM team. Many others came along with us. And we’re still relentlessly pursuing the same mission: defend the world, by finding the bugs before the bad guys do.
Still probably the smartest collection of people I've ever been in a room with. Also, the company's attitude had a permanent effect on how I perceive things that other people describe as "impossible."
It's an honour to do ground breaking things with some of the sharpest minds on the planet. Thank you for allowing me to be a part of this incredible journey.
An amazing journey, I was so glad to be part of that piece of history and continue been with XBOW!
I don’t know if you remember me, but many years ago we worked on a project with Semmle and Microsoft SQL Server, and Semmle helped us a great deal. It’s so amazing to see how far your work has gone.
Go Oege de Moor! Was great to work together several years ago to make Github Copilot more resilient to potential cybersecurity challenges on the frontier. The work was way ahead of its time.
"For me, working with people I admire is my greatest professional joy" THIS sentiment, right from the very top, is the single greatest cultural asset we have as a company. Not just the respect or admiration, but the JOY you get. It's felt, and it spreads like wildfire within our company. On behalf of XBOW, THANK YOU for spreading joy, Oege de Moor
Amazing journey! You are a pioneer!
Great Memories - people, deals, travel, etc.
Such great memories from those Semmle days!
Exactly 11 years ago, September 30th, 2015, I boarded a plane in Copenhagen to fly to New York as I joined Semmle. Today, I manage a global team of highly technical Field Security Specialists, making our customers maximize the value of GitHub Advanced Security and CodeQL. Joining Semmle has been the greatest decision of my career. It's been a blast. It still is.