Amar Goel

Amar Goel is co-founder and chief executive of Bito, which makes an AI agent that reviews code changes in GitHub, GitLab and Bitbucket. Born in Mountain View, California, he founded the advertising technology company PubMatic in 2006 and was its first chief executive, according to his South Park Commons event biography.

A Silicon Valley childhood

He was born at El Camino Hospital in Mountain View, and both of his parents worked in technology. “My dad was a semiconductor engineer, my mom worked in software companies and hardware and SAP,” he said on the Match Relevant podcast. He started programming in high school and went on to Harvard, where he earned a bachelor’s degree in economics and a master’s in computer science. Before PubMatic he worked at Netscape and McKinsey & Co. and led sales for a digital advertising business at Microsoft.

PubMatic and what came after

PubMatic, which his biography credits with creating the first programmatic ad exchange, went public on the Nasdaq in 2020. Goel described the months after the listing as “a little bit like mentally hard after that for a little bit you know, trying to process that.” He decided to start another company. “I really like building things,” he said, and he wanted his sons to watch him work: “I felt like it was really important for my boys to see that.”

Code review for AI-written code

Bito started in 2022 with AI chat tools for developers. Goel then shifted it toward review, reasoning that developers “are going to interact with agents that are going to write a lot of that code,” while still being responsible for what goes live. Its code review agent reads a team’s repository, comments on pull requests, and can also give feedback inside the developer’s code editor before a senior engineer looks at the change.