Who we are

If your company builds its own software, the chances are it is business-critical. You did not build it for fun. You built it to run the operation, carry the revenue, and keep moving while the market shifts under you. But the people who carry responsibility for that software, the managers and the board, are rarely the ones writing the code. So when you ask how healthy it really is, the honest answer is usually some version of this. I have good people on it, so I trust it is fine.

We started Boncode because that answer is not good enough when the stakes are this high.

Why we exist
We believe software is a strategic business asset, not a technical detail to leave to the people who build it. Senior management carries the responsibility for the systems the company depends on. And you can only carry that responsibility if you know what is going on. Not based on opinions or gut feeling, but on facts.

And it happens whether your own team writes the code or you build it with a partner. The pressure of budgets, deadlines and changing requirements always leads to compromises somewhere. That is not a failure, it is the reality of software. The question is never whether those compromises exist. The question is whether you know about them. And the further you sit from the code, the harder they are to see.

Where it started
Boncode was built by people who have spent their careers inside the problem they now measure. Jan Willem Klerkx, our CEO, is an engineer by training, one of the few people who understands software engineers as well as he understands board members. He has long argued that an engineering decision is a business decision, and that in software engineering there are never really technical problems, only organizational ones that lead to technical issues. Jeroen Meetsma, our CTO, has spent years turning the quality of software into something a non-technical leader can see and act on, from maintainability to the risks that come with AI-generated code. The third co-founder, Joost Koen, brings a track record of building solid companies and keeps Boncode steady as it grows.

Harm Garvelink, our CCO, brings the view from the boardroom. After more than thirty years in sales and management, he looks at software the way an owner or an investor does, as a question of governance, risk and value.

What the team kept running into was the same gap. The people writing the code could see where the risks were, but had no way to bring that to the people carrying the responsibility. So they built an independent, technology-agnostic way to measure software quality and report it in plain terms, from the boardroom to the development team. That is still what we do today.