Early is a Tel Aviv-based startup that uses generative AI to generate unit tests, helping programmers catch potential bugs early in the development cycle. The company, which launched in August, today announced that it has raised a $5 million seed funding round led by Zeev Ventures, with participation from Dynamic Loop Capital.

In its current form, Early supports JavaScript and TypeScript and integrates with the Visual Studio Code IDE. From there, developers can quickly see how much of their code is covered by tests and then automatically generate validated tests right from within the IDE. Those tests, the company says, include mocks and aim to cover a wide variety of scenarios like happy paths and edge cases, which developers would otherwise have to code by hand.

While its focus right now is on helping developers create unit tests, Early CEO and co-founder Sharon Barr tells me that the overall mission is significantly broader. In an interview ahead of today's announcement, Barr stressed that he doesn't think of Early as a testing company. "I like to call us a code quality company," he said.

Code quality is something Barr surely knows about. Before founding Early, he was the VP of Engineering for Couchbase from 2010 to 2013 and then became the CTO of biotech company Bina. Bina was later acquired by Roche, where Barr held the role of VP of Software Engineering until 2018. He then joined EYGlobal, where he held a number of executive roles, reporting directly to the CTO.

His co-founder and CTO, Lior Froimovich, was an engineering lead at EY Global -- a role Barr hired him for -- and before that, he co-founded two startups.

"A year ago, I left EY together with my co-founder, Lior, whom I hired six years ago, and we said, 'Okay, let's see what we can do with this new, exciting technology of GenAI -- and one of the problem that we faced ourselves on our career is code quality," Barr told me. "And then we said, 'Okay, let's start with testing.' Let's see if you can generate code for testing -- and in the world of testing, let's start with unit tests. We experimented with it. We ended up raising money very quickly from Zeev Ventures, much faster than we expected, and have focused on the product since then."

Barr, like most of the AI startup founders I talk to these days, does not believe that AI and AI agents will replace humans anytime soon. But he does believe that a service like Early can free developers to focus on the more creative parts of coding.

"The Early team's deep understanding of both AI's potential and the nuances of software development puts them at the forefront of this revolution," said Oren Zeev, founder of Zeev Ventures. "They're not just using AI; they're applying it strategically to solve one of the most persistent and costly challenges in coding. I believe Early will become an indispensable tool for developers, dramatically reducing the time and cost associated with bug detection and fixing, and ultimately accelerating innovation across the tech industry."