Former Canonical CEO Jane Silber appointed as Chair of University of Oxford AI spin-out Diffblue

Diffblue, the Oxford-based world leader in AI for code, today announces that Jane Silber has been appointed Chair of the Board of Directors. Silber was most recently CEO of Canonical, the company behind Ubuntu – the marketing-leading Linux based operating system, where she remains on the board as a non-executive director. Silber has unrivalled experience in running and managing open-source software enterprises globally.

She was a member of the Canonical executive team since the company’s founding, serving as both COO and CEO, and as such helped lead the company through stages of product adoption, commercial growth, and organisational development. She also serves on the board of The Sensible Code Company, a platform for analysing and extracting data from public sources, on the board of Open Knowledge International, a global non-profit that promotes open data, and on the Board of Managers of Haverford College, a leading liberal arts college in Pennsylvania, USA.

As Chair of Diffblue’s Board of Directors, Silber will oversee the strategic and commercial direction of Diffblue and will support CEO Daniel Kroening as the company continues its product development and commercialisation efforts.

The news follows Diffblue’s announcement in July last year that it closed a $22 million funding round led by Goldman Sachs Principal Strategic Investments and Oxford Sciences Innovation. Diffblue is currently developing a code generation product that automatically writes test code for both legacy and current codebases; a security product that automatically flags up exploitable bugs and generates tests for those bugs; and a refactoring product that rewrites badly expressed or out of date code.

Daniel Kroening, CEO, Diffblue, said: “Jane brings a wealth of experience and is one of the most well-respected figures in the technology industry. She joins Diffblue at a pivotal moment in its growth as we prepare to launch two new products into the market. Her expertise and guidance will be invaluable as we continue to scale.”

Jane Silber added: “Diffblue is such an exciting company – a best-in-class product built by top-notch talent, software at the intersection of pure and pragmatic AI, and great market potential. I’m looking forward to being part of a company which will bring real change to software development practices and enterprise IT.”