Celebrating Rance Cleaveland (1961-2024)

Cary, NC (March 29, 2024) -- The Reactive Systems team is deeply saddened to report the passing of our co-founder, Chairman, and friend Rance Cleaveland. Rance died March 27, 2024. Our thoughts are with his family, whom he held so dear, and his many, many friends around the world.

Rance co-founded Reactive Systems with Scott Smolka and Steve Sims in 1999. The company develops and sells the Reactis suite of tools for the testing and verification of embedded software. Rance served as CEO from the company's founding through 2008 and as Chairman of the Board from the company's inception to present.

In the early 2000s, Rance took a sabbatical from his distinguished academic career to work full-time at Reactive Systems. During that period, Rance spent much of his time visiting engineers at different companies and using his natural rapport with people and gift for explaining complicated topics clearly to convince engineering teams to try our tools. But the exchanges were by no means one directional. Rance was a great listener also and used the insight into industrial development processes to shape the functionality of the tools Reactive Systems would offer. After stepping back from day-to-day management, Rance continued to chair the Board of Directors and help set the strategic direction of Reactive Systems. Rance's wise leadership and friendship will be deeply missed by all at Reactive Systems.

About Reactive Systems. Reactive Systems, founded in 1999, is a software testing and validation company with offices in Cary, NC and Nagoya, Japan. The Company develops the Reactis family of tools that support the test and debug of embedded software applications developed using Simulink®, Stateflow®, and C code.