3 Dec 20256 minute read
3 Dec 20256 minute read
Sourcegraph has announced that it’s spinning out Amp, its AI coding agent product, into an independent company. The company framed the change as necessary for greater freedom and focus in what is a fast-moving space.
Launched back in 2013, Sourcegraph is the developer tooling company best known for universal code search. After raising more than $200 million in venture capital funding and reaching a valuation of $2.6 billion, Sourcegraph launched Amp back in May, serving as its first full AI-native coding environment.
Moving forward, Sourcegraph will be focused entirely on code search and code understanding for big codebases, with Amp becoming an "independent research lab".
In a landscape where AI companies routinely chase eye-watering valuations, Sourcegraph’s move is more about positioning inside the rapidly expanding AI-coding sphere, a market that has accelerated faster than almost any other corner of developer tooling. The likes of Cognition, Replit, Cursor, and Lovable have all staked out different interpretations of what an AI-first coding experience should look like, raising nearly $2 billion between them in the past five months alone.
Amp, for its part, already claims to be profitable, with the product’s momentum pushing it toward independence. “Amp's traction spun us out of Sourcegraph, now, as our own company, we can follow where it leads,” the company wrote in a blog post.
Moreover, the company framed the separation as a bet on a rapidly changing software landscape, arguing that the best way to understand that shift is to ship into it rather than theorise from the sidelines. “Amp Inc. gives us more freedom to do that, to focus ruthlessly on the frontier, to explore the absurd and find the possible,” the company added.
Perhaps most telling amidst this is the leadership shift: Sourcegraph’s VP of business Dan Adler moves into the CEO role at Sourcegraph, while co-founder and longstanding CEO Quinn Slack takes over as CEO of Amp Inc. This shows which side of the split Slack believes needs founder-level attention.
“Internally, we’ve been operating more independently for the last 45 days and working with customers on the transition, and it has been going incredibly smoothly,” Slack explained in a LinkedIn post. “The future is bright. This change will give both Sourcegraph and Amp more focus and will let us ship better and faster.”
One thing that isn’t splitting, though, is the investor base. Craft, Redpoint, Sequoia, Goldcrest, and Andreessen Horowitz will serve on the boards of both companies, signalling continuity behind the structural change.
The Sourcegraph–Amp split lands at a time when AI-native developer tools have emerged as a category of their own, rather than features inside older stacks. Developers are switching into AI-first environments like Cursor, Replit, and Lovable instead of installing plugins, while longstanding incumbents are also organizing their AI-native tooling around dedicated brands, evident in the likes of GitHub’s Copilot.
And now Sourcegraph is spinning out Amp as a standalone entity, a tacit acknowledgment that the AI-native workflow no longer fits neatly inside traditional developer-tool companies.
Sourcegraph describes the decision as a way to let both products operate at their natural speeds. Code search has a steady, infrastructure-heavy cadence. Amp, by contrast, moves on much faster cycles, shaped by context workflows, social surfaces, agent behaviour, and interaction models that change month to month.
“We’ve realized over the last few months that the two products have totally different distribution engines and target audiences,” Slack and Adler wrote in a joint blog post. “Sourcegraph is a mission-critical piece of AI infrastructure software that delivers a consistent experience for enterprises across a wide range of cloud and self-hosted environments. Amp needs to remain on the frontier, exploring what’s possible with models and tools and agents by building for the devs and teams who want to be a year ahead of everyone else.”
In short, keeping them under one roof created conflicting priorities. By separating, each product can optimise for its own audience rather than compromise for the other’s. Users may feel the cost of managing two specialised tools instead of a single suite, but the bet is that independence produces sharper products on both sides.
Amp’s recent output supports that logic. Over the past few months it has introduced public developer profiles and, perhaps most notably, launched an ad-supported business model which is already generating real money. Together, these moves suggest a platform already defining itself rather than extending a parent product. And with hindsight, the split looks more like a formalisation of momentum already underway.
