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The Startup That Stayed Hidden for Years—And Raised $47 Million Doing It

Most founders obsess over launch day. Will Wilson spent years making sure nobody knew his company existed.

In a recent episode of Category Visionaries, Will Wilson, Co-Founder of Antithesis, an autonomous testing platform that’s raised $47 million, shared a go-to-market journey that breaks every conventional startup rule. No ads. Years in stealth. Brutal honesty with investors about probable failure. And somehow, it all worked.

The Secret Weapon Nobody Knew About

The story actually begins before Antithesis existed, at a startup called FoundationDB. Will and his co-founder Dave Scherer were building what seemed impossible: a distributed database that could run across multiple computers while maintaining the reliability of a single machine.

“People have often asked us, how do we build that thing? And what was our secret weapon?” Will explained. “The secret weapon, basically, was that we developed an extremely powerful autonomous testing system.”

This wasn’t just good testing. It was transformative. “By doing this really fast in parallel, it kind of found all the bugs, not literally 100%, but it found the vast majority of bugs that were ever introduced into that product,” Will shared. “When you’ve got this amazing robot assistant that just tells you whenever you’re about to make a mistake, hey, it’s actually a lot easier to write code.”

After Apple acquired FoundationDB in 2015, Will found himself at Google, watching brilliant engineers struggle without these powerful testing tools. “These are the biggest, richest, coolest companies on earth, and they don’t have this technology that our teeny tiny startup did,” he recalled. “That seems crazy. That seems like a business opportunity.”

Building From the Ground Up

When Antithesis launched in 2018, they knew they were attempting something unprecedented. “In order to build what we’ve built here, we had to go back to the very foundations of how computers work and change a whole lot of stuff,” Will explained. “We had to write our own hypervisor that is able to run virtual machines in a completely different way than anybody else ever has.”

This deep technical work meant years of development before they could ship anything. “It took a few years, and that’s a lot longer than most startups,” Will acknowledged. “We did actually get early design partners and paying customers as early as we possibly could. But for us, as early as possible was still a few years into the thing.”

The breakthrough came when they started using their own tool. “There was a magical moment when we started using it, too, and we started feeling it, like, really giving us lift and making us go faster,” Will shared. Even better, their early customers couldn’t get enough. “We did start to notice that our customers, like, loved it, couldn’t get enough out of it. And, like, you know, we’re putting more and more of their eggs in this basket.”

The Anti-Launch Launch Strategy

Here’s where things get interesting. Most startups would have launched publicly at this point, eager to capitalize on early momentum. Antithesis did the opposite.

“We were in stealth for an incredibly long time,” Will explained. “Even after we got that first paying customer, we actually stayed in stealth for, like, another three years, just, like, making the thing better, iterating on it, like, slowly growing our customer base through word of mouth.”

But this wasn’t just hiding. It was strategic mystique-building. “We did try to, like, cultivate, like, an aura of secrecy,” Will shared. “We sort of tried to make it, like, a badly kept secret that many people in Silicon Valley whispered about and that when you learned about it, you felt like you were sort of being given access to a special club. And, like, that actually worked super well.”

The result? When people finally discovered Antithesis, they felt like they’d stumbled onto something exclusive. “That made it sort of irresistible to a lot of people,” Will noted.

Nintendo, Nostalgia, and Viral Marketing

When Antithesis finally emerged from stealth, they needed a marketing strategy. Will’s answer? “Once we came out of stealth, our marketing approach has been 100% content driven. We’ve actually still literally never paid for an ad.”

Their content strategy started with an unlikely choice: 1980s Nintendo games. “The very first type of other software that we were testing was actually Nintendo games, like classic 1980s Nintendo games,” Will explained. The reasoning was partly technical—the games were “very visual, easy to understand” and “very efficient to run”—but the genius was in the nostalgia.

“There’s this other whole benefit, which is, it’s a major source of nostalgia for millions and millions of people,” Will said. “In the process of testing our own software, we generate these videos of it playing Nintendo games and utterly destroying them and finding all kinds of crazy bugs.”

These videos became their marketing engine, making complex autonomous testing technology accessible and entertaining. It’s the kind of creative thinking that only works when you’re solving for genuine interest rather than clicks.

When asked how to create good content in an oversaturated world, Will’s formula was simple but hard: “Have something interesting to say, and then number two, say it well and think about who your audience is.” He acknowledged that “just step one, having something interesting to say is like a thing that, you know, many people in the world are not able to pull off.”

Picking Your Battlefield

Despite building technology that could test virtually anything, Antithesis made a critical go-to-market decision: extreme focus. “Autonomous testing is an insanely broad category, and the technology we’ve built fundamentally could be used to test anything,” Will explained. “But, like, we didn’t want to go to market trying to sell the sun and the earth and the moon and the universe.”

They chose reliability and fault tolerance testing for big backend systems. The logic was strategic: “One, our founding team has a background in that stuff. Two, everybody’s kind of got one. And so it’s a pretty large niche, as niches go. And then three, the existing tooling and existing solutions for this problem are insanely bad.”

This focus meant starting where the bar was lowest and their expertise was highest. “In terms of keeping our go to market energy focused on a particular customer profile and keeping our product focused on a very particular, you know, problem domain, it’s really paid off,” Will reflected.

The Truth About Creating Categories

Ask Will about competitors, and you’ll get an unexpected answer. “We basically believe that the category doesn’t exist yet,” he explained. “Often when we’re talking to investors or potential employees or whatever, they ask us, who are your competitors? And the answer is we don’t think there are any.”

But he doesn’t see this as an advantage. “Having competitors is great. Like if you have competitors, that’s like evidence that somebody else thinks this problem is worth solving. That’s like other people who are out there educating the marketplace about what you’re doing and like creating a budget category for what you’re doing.”

The reality of category creation is sobering. “Having zero competitors, having a brand new greenfield area is like terrifying. It does mean that the potential upside is really big, but I actually think it makes the problem strictly harder.”

When skeptics tell Will that autonomous testing is impossible, he welcomes it. “That’s the best possible objection to get, I think, as a startup because they’re conceding that if it were possible, it would be really useful,” he explained. “Now all I have to do is convince you that I’m not lying and I’m not. So that actually makes it really easy.”

The Fundraising Conversation Nobody Has

Perhaps the most counterintuitive aspect of Antithesis’s journey is how they approached investors. While most founders polish their pitch to minimize risk, Will led with it.

“With our investors, we told them from very early on, look, this is a moonshot,” Will shared. “Like, it’s probably not going to work. You’re probably going to lose all your money, and it’s going to take a very long time to find out whether it’s working or not.”

This radical honesty built unshakeable trust. “I think the fact that we were just totally upfront about that from the very first meeting, you know, and never shied around that issue is the foundation of us having a good relationship with our investors,” Will explained. “They really appreciated that we weren’t bullshitting them on that.”

The payoff? “When indeed things took a long time to figure out if it was working or not, they weren’t surprised or upset.”

Selling to the Skeptics

Developers are notoriously hard to sell to, and Will has figured out why. “My number one piece of advice is developers are incredibly cynical people,” he explained. “They by nature assume that everything has a catch. And so if you make your pitch, like, paradoxically, I think if you make your pitch too good, like they’re not going to believe it.”

His solution flips traditional sales on its head: lead with weaknesses. “If you just tell them what the catch is or like, tell them what the weaknesses of your approach are or like what situations you might not want to use it in,” Will advised. “Be a little self deprecating and a little humble and be like, look, my thing is great in this situation. It totally won’t work in this one. Which situation are you in?”

The result? “I think that actually smooths the sale process tremendously.”

What Happens Next

Looking three to five years out, Will’s vision is ambitious but straightforward. “The big picture is that almost all manual human software testing effort is completely eliminated and developers can produce software much more quickly,” he explained. “They produce much higher quality software that works better in more situations, and everybody has more fun doing it.”

For founders building deep tech or trying to create new categories, Antithesis’s journey offers a different playbook. Stay in stealth longer than feels comfortable. Build mystique, not hype. Be brutally honest with investors. Lead with your weaknesses when selling to technical audiences. Focus ruthlessly on one problem, even when your technology could solve dozens.

Most importantly, have the patience to let great technology prove itself. In a world of growth hacking and viral launches, sometimes the smartest go-to-market strategy is having the discipline to wait.