Tariq Shaukat Joins Sonar as co-CEO

Former President of Google Cloud and Bumble joins Clean Code market leader to accelerate growth alongside Founder and CEO Olivier Gaudin

September 12, 2023 08:05 AM Eastern Daylight Time

AUSTIN, Texas & GENEVA–(BUSINESS WIRE)–Today, Sonar, the leading Clean Code solution provider, announced that Tariq Shaukat has joined the company as co-Chief Executive Officer (CEO) and a member of the Board of Directors. Tariq will lead the company in lockstep with Founder and CEO Olivier Gaudin. This model strengthens the leadership team and prepares the company for its next phase of growth. Tariq has extensive experience in growing and scaling private and public companies across diverse industries. Coupled with Olivier’s technical and market vision, the partnership will become a formidable force in the industry. Sonar is the world’s leading Clean Code solution, helping organizations increase innovation and productivity while decreasing business risk and technical debt.

“As software, and the software development lifecycle, continue to become more complex, organizations need to find systemic ways to ensure what they’re releasing is truly secure, reliable, and maintainable”Tweet this

Tariq’s experience spans many domains, including enterprise and consumer software, cloud infrastructure, retail, travel, and entertainment. Before joining the Sonar team, Tariq served as President of Bumble Inc. from July 2020 to August 2023, helping to lead the company’s successful public offering on the NASDAQ stock exchange in 2021. While at Bumble, he led company operations and partnered with the Founder and CEO to scale the company to over $900M in revenue in 2022.

Before that, Tariq was the President of Google Cloud from 2016 to 2020 and played a crucial role in scaling the business to over US$ 10B in ARR. At Google Cloud, Tariq was responsible for a wide range of functions, including go-to-market, product and engineering for industry initiatives, partnerships, and its AI Solutions Lab. He has also held senior roles at Caesars Entertainment and McKinsey & Company.

Tariq is an independent Director on the boards of Gap, Inc. and Public Storage. He holds a B.S. in Mechanical Engineering and an M.S. in Technology and Policy from Massachusetts Institute of Technology, as well as an M.S. in Mechanical Engineering from Stanford University.

“I am thrilled to have Tariq join Sonar. Our product-led growth motion, built on top of our widely used open source solution, has generated profitable growth and brought us to more than US$ 200M in revenue. And this is just the beginning for us. Tariq will help us to build the go-to-market engine that will get us to US$ 1B,” said Gaudin. “On top of his unique background, which mixes both B2C and B2B, Tariq deeply understands the problem Sonar is solving and the tremendous value that Clean Code creates for businesses. I look forward to our partnership through the next phase of growth for the company.”

Over the last 15 years, Sonar has analyzed more than half-a-trillion lines of code across all industries and company sizes, resulting in a deep understanding of how code is written and managed. Today’s generative AI tools are expected to significantly increase the quantity of code written. However, without proper coding practices and quality checks, generative AI will likely produce high volumes of code-level issues and vulnerabilities, leading to greater technical debt and increased risk. With Sonar’s Clean Code solution, developers ensure the quality of AI-generated code, avoiding liabilities.

“It has been clear for a while that every company, across every industry, is a software company. Increasingly, they are also AI companies. Sonar is at the center of this massive and growing ecosystem, helping more than 500,000 companies around the world develop better code with higher velocity, leading to higher quality, more secure software. I’m excited to partner with Olivier and the team to extend the reach and impact we can have,” said Shaukat.

“As software, and the software development lifecycle, continue to become more complex, organizations need to find systemic ways to ensure what they’re releasing is truly secure, reliable, and maintainable,” said Deep Nishar, Managing Director at General Catalyst. “I believe Sonar’s Clean as You Code methodology is the ideal developer-tested and loved approach to achieving this objective. With the joining of Tariq, we think that developer usage and enterprise adoption of the Sonar Clean Code solution will accelerate and that Sonar will continue to solidify its place as a must-have component of the software development lifecycle globally.”

“Sonar’s growth, market presence, and technical innovation continue to impress us. With so much opportunity ahead to scale the business, we are thrilled to welcome Tariq to the executive team to co-lead the company alongside Olivier,” said Richard Wells, Managing Director at Insight Partners. “Tariq and Olivier are complementary in every sense – we can’t wait to see what the two of them will accomplish together.”

About Sonar

Sonar equips organizations to achieve and sustain a Clean Code state by empowering developers to write consistent, intentional, adaptable, and responsible code. Clean Code produces software that is maintainable, reliable, and secure, allowing development teams to spend less time fixing issues and more time innovating. With Sonar, and by employing the company’s Clean as You Code methodology, organizations minimize risk, reduce technical debt, increase productivity, and derive more value from their software in a predictable and sustainable way.

Sonar’s open source and commercial products – SonarLint, SonarCloud, and SonarQube – support over 30 programming languages, frameworks, and infrastructure technologies. Trusted by more than 500,000 organizations and used by more than 7 million developers globally to clean more than half a trillion lines of code, Sonar is integral to delivering better software.

To learn more about Sonar, please visit https://www.sonarsource.com/company/about/.