About us

We’re passionate about software and obsessed with quality.
We build tools that help developers make better products, faster.

The spinout story

Cocotec spun out of the University of Oxford in 2018 by Dr Philippa Hopcroft, Dr Tom Gibson-Robinson, Prof Bill Roscoe, and Guy Broadfoot, and is headquartered in Guildford, UK. Our software tools build on innovative academic research done at Oxford, combined with decades of experience of applying formal verification tools in industry. We developed some of the world’s most advanced scalable formal verification tools and programming languages to automatically detect a broad range of complex software errors, which are well-known to be extremely difficult to find using traditional testing practices. Dr Tom Gibson-Robinson, then a Senior Researcher at Oxford, led the research and spearheaded the technology development that became Cocotec’s launch product, the Coco Platform.

Leadership

Portrait of Thomas Gibson-Robinson

Dr Tom Gibson-Robinson Co-Founder and CTO

Introducing Tom, Co-Founder and CTO of Cocotec. He has over a decade’s worth of experience in building high-performance formal verification tools. Combined with his passion for programming languages and building software, he is the driving force behind our innovation and tools. Tom completed his DPhil at the University of Oxford in 2013 on the theory of analysing layered security protocols. Prior to launching Cocotec, Tom was a Senior Researcher at the University of Oxford, where he specialised in algebras for expressing and reasoning about concurrent systems, as well as in model checking algorithms and tools. He has built some of the fastest model checking tools of their kind, and is the author of Coco, a modern programming language designed specifically for building event-driven software, which is one of the main innovations underpinning the Coco Platform.
Portrait of Philippa Hopcroft

Dr Philippa Hopcroft Co-Founder and CEO

Meet Philippa, Co-Founder and CEO of Cocotec. With twenty years’ worth of experience in formal verification, she pushes the boundaries of what’s possible with verification tools in practice, and leads the charge in bringing the technology to ambitious businesses. Philippa completed her DPhil at the University of Oxford in 2001, in the area of security protocol analysis. Prior to launching Cocotec, Philippa spent three years as a Senior Research Fellow at the University of Oxford, where she sought to bring the power of automated verification and code generation to model-based engineering platforms in an accessible way. She was instrumental in getting strong support and engagement from companies across different industries, and a driving force in successfully spinning out Cocotec from the University of Oxford.