Sonar, the Austin, Texas, company behind the SonarQube code analysis platform, acquired Gitar, a startup that uses AI agents to review pull requests and fix failing builds. Sonar announced the deal on 21 May 2026 in a press release and a post on its community forum.
The companies did not disclose financial terms.
Gitar will remain on sale as a standalone product, and Sonar said existing Gitar customers would not be affected. It will also be sold together with SonarQube and SonarQube Advanced Security. Gitar chief executive Ali-Reza Adl-Tabatabai and co-founder Gautam Korlam are joining Sonar, where they will keep leading development of the product.
What Gitar built
Gitar works on the stage after code has been written, whether by a person or an AI coding tool. It reviews a pull request with knowledge of the wider codebase, including logic, data flows and dependencies, so that it can flag problems outside the lines that changed.
It also reads continuous integration pipeline failures, diagnoses the bug behind them and retries tests that fail intermittently. When it finds a problem it writes a fix, checks the fix against the project's CI and commits it back to the branch before the code is merged. Sonar's announcement says Gitar works with pull requests on GitHub and GitLab.
In Sonar's forum post announcing the deal, John Clifton described Gitar as an autonomous agent meant to get a build to green, and argued that passing CI on its own does not prove code is safe to ship.
“While the market chased AI code generation, we focused on the harder problem: validating it. We built Gitar because we saw firsthand what happens when development velocity outpaces code quality.”
Why Sonar is buying
SonarQube checks code with rules and static analysis. Sonar says more than 75% of Fortune 100 companies and 7 million developers and their AI agents use it, and that it analyses more than 750 billion lines of code a day. Gitar adds a review layer driven by AI models that looks at what a change is trying to do, aimed at logic errors and functional bugs that rule-based checks can miss. The company also claims that teams using Sonar are 44% less likely to suffer outages caused by AI-generated code.
Sonar plans to connect the two so that review runs from the moment an agent starts writing code until the code lands in the main codebase. Chief executive Tariq Shaukat said enterprises adopting AI need strong checks on what agents produce, and that customers would get one platform whether they write code with Claude Code, Cursor, Codex, Devin or GitHub Copilot.
The forum post cited figures saying AI coding tools now generate up to 42% of committed code, and said review and CI processes designed for human-paced work are struggling to keep up, leaving longer pull request queues and more pipeline failures.
The founders and the funding
Adl-Tabatabai previously worked at Uber, Google and Meta. He and Korlam helped build Uber's centralised developer platform, according to Sonar.
Gitar emerged from stealth in April 2026 with $9 million in funding, The AI Insider reported on 17 April. Venrock led the round, with Sierra Ventures taking part. The company said at the time it would use the money to expand its engineering and product teams and scale its validation infrastructure. The sale to Sonar came about five weeks later.
Gitar's headcount was not reported in the sources reviewed.
Sonar's push into agent tooling
The purchase follows a run of product launches aimed at AI coding agents. Over the previous 12 months Sonar released SonarQube Advanced Security for supply-chain checks, an agentic analysis feature that lets agents verify their own output, an MCP server that connects agents to SonarQube's analysis engine, a command-line tool that scans agent output for leaked secrets, and a plugin for Anthropic's Claude Code.
Sonar said it would hold a live demonstration and question session on Gitar on 11 June 2026. Pricing for the combined products is available through its sales team.
