Semgrep, Inc.

Semgrep was founded in 2017 by three MIT graduates - Isaac Evans, Drew Dennison, and Luke O'Malley - who shared a mission to profoundly improve software security from day one. The founders first collaborated during MIT's Independent Activities Period in 2011 on a contract to secure Android apps for the U.S. Army, which sparked their interest in software security. In 2016, Evans and Dennison became Entrepreneurs in Residence at Redpoint Ventures, where they explored opportunities in the software security space. They recognized a fundamental problem: security tools were too complex, slowed down development, and created an asymmetry where attackers had the advantage. Security was treated as a specialized skillset rather than something every developer could participate in. In 2019, during an internal hackathon at their startup (then called r2c), the team encountered the open-source sgrep tool, originally created by Yoann Padioleau at Facebook. They recognized its potential and hired Padioleau to help revive and expand the project. This became the foundation of Semgrep - a tool designed to democratize security by making it as easy as using "Grammarly for code." The founders' vision was to create a developer-friendly security platform that would make it expensive to exploit software by empowering every programmer to write security rules and participate in securing code, rather than requiring highly specialized security expertise. Their goal was to allow companies to maintain development velocity without sacrificing security, addressing the core problem that defenders were at a disadvantage against attackers.