Why Sourcegraph and Amp Are Becoming Independent Companies

Sourcegraph and Amp are becoming two separate companies, pushing the frontier of software development in code search and coding agents, respectively. Dan Adler will step into the role of CEO at Sourcegraph. Quinn Slack and Beyang Liu will remain on Sourcegraph’s board and are founding Amp Inc. with the other members of the Amp team from Sourcegraph. Our board investors Craft, Redpoint, Sequoia, Goldcrest, and a16z will continue to serve on the boards of both companies.

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When we founded Sourcegraph a decade ago, our mission was to tame and eventually automate the tedious parts of working in big, messy codebases. We had felt these pains ourselves, and we knew that organizing and making code searchable was a prerequisite to solving this problem. That’s why we first built Sourcegraph, and more recently created Amp, our frontier coding agent.

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Now, a decade later, having earned the trust of the best tech companies, AI research labs, and the biggest global banks, it’s clear that the need for code search and understanding is bigger than ever. Codebases are bigger and messier than ever before because AI is writing more code than humans ever could, and performing 1000x more code searches than humans ever could. Sourcegraph’s code search helps human devs maintain these fast-growing codebases and helps the emerging jungle of coding agents produce higher-quality output when they hit the limit of what they can do with purely local tools.

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We’ve seen this massive new opportunity for code search in the era of agents first-hand through our work on Amp, which began as an experiment less than 9 months ago and has quickly grown into one of the leading coding agents. We’ve taken lessons from building Amp and rolled them into the much-loved Deep Search feature in Sourcegraph, which agentically searches and aggregates context across vast mono-repo and multi-repo codebases. And there’s so much more awesome stuff on the roadmap for Sourcegraph, including deep integrations into all the coding agents you use (not just Amp), agentic large-scale refactoring, and more.

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So, why are we making Sourcegraph and Amp two separate companies? Why not one company (Sourcegraph) with two products (code search and Amp)? We’ve realized over the last few months that the two products have totally different distribution engines and target audiences. Sourcegraph is a mission-critical piece of AI infrastructure software that delivers a consistent experience for enterprises across a wide range of cloud and self-hosted environments. Amp needs to remain on the frontier, exploring what’s possible with models and tools and agents by building for the devs and teams who want to be a year ahead of everyone else. Because of the fundamental differences in distribution and audience, we've decided that it’s best for both products to go forward in separate, focused companies.

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Dan Adler, who’s stepping up as Sourcegraph CEO, has been a critical part of Sourcegraph since before our first customer. A CS major and programmer by background, he wrote Sourcegraph's original data infrastructure and has hundreds of commits to our production codebase. Over the years, he has helped shepherd us through the SaaS and Cloud eras, the COVID era, and now the AI era, starting almost every new function at Sourcegraph himself (most recently being our CFO) and building a successful, accelerating business with lots of dev and customer love. We’re thrilled for him to step up, and in the 45 days since we’ve been quietly operating more independently on our internal teams and working with our customers on the transition, we’re happy to report that it has gone incredibly smoothly.

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We are so grateful to our wonderful customers who put their trust in our world-class team. We're also excited that this change provides opportunities for our teammates, all of whom are going to either Sourcegraph or Amp, to step up into new roles and responsibilities that will make each of our products better. Moving forward, both companies will innovate and ship at an even faster pace and serve their customers with greater focus and clarity.

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The future is bright. We are all incredibly excited about the road ahead as Sourcegraph and Amp work independently to advance the frontier of software development.

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Quinn and Dan

‍See the Amp Inc. announcement on the Amp site.

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See the Sourcegraph roadmap and a Note from Dan on the Sourcegraph blog.