Awesome

Awesome Lisp Company is the curated lisp for companies that use Lisp Extensively in their stack.

👽 This list intended only for company with Common Lisp and Scheme usage 👽

For more resources, see:

• lisp-lang.org's success stories
• LispWorks Success Stories
• Allegro Common Lisp Success Stories
• LispJobs archives

Table of Contents

• Awesome Lisp Company
  • North America
    • United States
    • Canada
    • Mexico
  • Europe
    • Belgium
    • Denmark
    • England
    • France
    • Germany
    • Italy
    • Netherlands
    • Norway
    • Poland
    • Portugal
    • Russia
    • Spain
    • Sweden
    • Switzerland
    • Ukraine
  • Africa
    • South Africa
  • Asia
    • India
    • Korea
    • Japan
  • Virtual or Unsure of Location
  • Contributors
  • Guidelines to contribute
  • Credit
  • License
  • Other Awesome Lists

North America

United States

• ACL2 is an industrial-grade theorem proover.
  • its industrial users include AMD, Arm, Centaur Technology, IBM, Intel, Motorola, Oracle or again Collins Aerospace. 1, 2.
• Acceleration
  • Acceleration is a leading provider of business class IT solutions: high-speed internet access services, private network design and managed support, website design, hosting, dedicated and virtual server hosting,... they have a Github account.
• ASTN Group, Inc.
  • brings AI systems that will change the way we do things, from the airline industry; financial systems; and military applications, to name a few.
  • all core components are written in Common Lisp to adapt to the dynamic nature of information propagation to support reflective computations and allow seamless code updates.
  • location: Austin, TX
  • Active as of June 2022.
• Boeing
  • uses the Allegro NFS Server in the onboard network system of Boeing 747 and 777 aircraft (source: video, ELS 2015).
  • uses Allegro CL for their Boeing Simplified English Checker (source).
• Barefoot Networks
  • "we use Lisp (via Allegro CL’s Enterprise class development environment) in the design of our Intel Tofino series of programmable switch chips"
  • article on Franz Inc networks, some words on reddit, and a youtube video.
• Bentley
  • Bentley PlantWise, a knowledge-based application for plant concept design, is built in Allegro CL. source.
• Bloxl, an interactive visual display.
  • "An environment built with Bloxl grids is responsive to the people who inhabit it. Bloxl can fill a space with colors that pulse to the beat of music, giant scrolling text banners, abstract patterns and detailed animations."
  • the Bloxl software is built on April, an APL compiler built in Common Lisp. April's author is Bloxl's CTO.
  • seen on the European Lisp Symposium of 2022 and on https://www.arraycast.com/episodes/episode23-andrew-sengul
• BroadVision
  • building BroadVision QuickSilver, "one of the most powerful document creation and management tools available, enables businesses to create and publish lengthy, complex documents in virtually any language and any format.
  • the software started out as Interleaf in 1981, and still runs on Lisp.
• Cadence
  • software and engineering services for electronic design automation. San Jose, CA (headquarters of worldwide company). Their IC design software uses SKILL (a Franz Lisp variant) as a scripting language.
• Clozure Associates
  • software development consulting firm specializing in Common Lisp development. Somerville, MA. Sponsors and developers of OpenMCL.
  • Active as of January 2018.
• Daric
  • Industry-leading software to help manage risk and improve the customer experience for the world's leading financial institutions. Client of the MOCL mobile and OSX implementation.
• Design Power - Software Products and Services for Design Automation Solutions
  • Design++ is a knowledge-based engineering software for design automation, built in Allegro CL. source.
  • "With Design++ and its Dynamic Object technology, engineers can see the result of design changes immediately, making the design process much faster and easier." ""Without Common Lisp," says Design Power's Tapio Karras, "we would never have been able to develop such a complex and sophisticated system as Design++."
• DXC Technoloyg - a multinational IT services and consulting company.
  • uses and develops SARA (SuperAgent Robotic Application), an automation tool "designed to streamline complex and repetitive business processes for major airlines", written in Common Lisp.
  • Hiring on May, 2024: job announce.
• Eaton Vance
  • financial services. Boston, MA. Bruce Lewis created BRL , a dialect of Scheme called “a database-oriented language to embed in HTML and other markup.”
  • Active as of January 2018
• EnRoute Systems
  • (formerly Trip Planner) - trip planning solutions including planning engine, web front-end, hosting, and data import/repair. Spokanne, WA. Lots of details on the Technical Info page (including discussion of packages, infrastructure, and algorithms). Made by Jean-Paul Larocque, who has more lisp code on his main site, ThoughtCrime. (news coverage)
• Excelon Solutions
  • "a leader in truly flexible Salesforce, AWS Services, VMware, Microsoft Azure, IT Services and other I.T. business solutions."
  • Hiring on March, 2024
• Grammarly
  • create an English language writing-enhancement platform. Running Lisp in Production
• Franz Inc.
  • offers AllegroCL, a Common Lisp compiler and programming environment; AllegroGraph, a graph database / triple store written in Common Lisp; and consultancy services. Oakland, CA.
  • Active as of September 2018
• Gensym
  • Since 1986, Gensym's G2 has been the leading real-time expert system development platform for building mission critical process control, alarm management, and complex simulation applications.
  • Privately owned since 2007, Gensym established an affiliation with Ignite Technologies in October 2015, increasing Gensym's investment in G2 innovation and G2-based solutions.
• Genworks
  • provides General-purpose Declarative Language (GDL), a Generative Application Development system for creating web-centric Knowledge Based Engineering and Business applications, based on the free software Gendl. Genworks uses AllegroCL, its Head of Product Development is the founder of the Common Lisp foundation.
• GigaMonkeys Consulting
  • software development and QA consulting. Oakland, CA. Deserves mention because Peter Seibel wrote Practical Common Lisp, claimed by ITA Software as their training manual.
• GrammaTech
  • Source code analysis tools for C, C++, Ada. Ithaca, NY. Hiring software engineers and interns with experience programming in Scheme, compilers, and static analysis.
  • released Resolve, software AST-based diff calculation, display, and automated resolution. AGPL-3, C++ and Common Lisp.
  • Active as of January 2022
• GraphMetrix
  • automation of document extraction and publishing for construction, property and logistics.
  • Active as of September 2020.

"We are using Lisp as the main engine for our RDF -> Sparql -> in-memory rdf db -> conceptual inference system at graphMetrix"

• HRL Laboratories
  • One of the world's premier physical science and engineering research laboratories.
  • Engage in the development of a full quantum device and computation stack, including an optimizing compiler for a quantum programming language. Uses SBCL.
  • Active as of April 2021.
• Inspiration Software, Inc
  • educational software, including InspireData, a product for building data literacy. Beaverton, OR. Made in LispWorks.
• ITA Software by Google
  • airfare search engine and airline scheduling software. Cambridge, MA. Common Lisp used for basically everything, currently hiring and expanding their business.
  • Github.com/Qitab is a repository for third-party Lisp code out of Google/ITA, with libraries such as gRPC or cl-protobufs.
  • Active as of January 2018
• Mind AI
  • Founded in 2018, Mind AI is an artificial intelligence engine and an ecosystem that was created to offer an entirely new approach to AI.
• MusicEase - MusicEase Software has been involved in the development of music notation software for over 35 years.
  • "MusicEase is a constraint-based system with a large amount of knowledge of music notation. This allows it to intelligently handle many of the details of scoring automatically."
  • a LispWorks success story.
  • includes a fully functional demo, free for 30 days (printouts are watermarked). Available on Windows and MacOS.
• Mutual Knowledge Systems
  • MuKn (pronounced "moon") develops the open source Glow language for smart contracts on blockchains. The compiler and support libraries are implemented in Gerbil Scheme. The team is fully remote and is hiring globally.
• the NASA develops
  • PVS, "the People's Verification System". PVS is a verification system: that is, a specification language integrated with support tools and a theorem prover. See also pvslib.
  • the SPIKE planning and scheduling software, used in the Hubble and James-Webb space telescops, using Allegro CL.
  • let's remind the Remote Agent Experiment (Deep Space 1 space probe, 1999).
• OurDoings.com
  • photo sharing site aimed towards casual photographers. Beverly, MA. Kawa Scheme running on JVM, created by Bruce Lewis
• PTC's 3D CAD software - 3D Design Software.
  • "Creo Elements/Direct is a comprehensive system for mechanical engineers and designers who create products using the direct modeling approach to 3D CAD." [Proprietary, free version].
  • example use: the Eterna brand usee it to develop its watches.
  • "7+ million lines of Common Lisp code" (source: ELS 2009 slides)
  • free version for Microsoft Windows x64.
• RIFFIT
  • Learning with real time text-to-song. Uses a combination of SIOD Scheme for natural language processing and SBCL and ECL for the core technology.
  • Active as of July, 2021
• Rigetti Quantum Computing
  • Manufacturer of quantum computers and provider of their services through their product called Forest. Much of their code is written in Common Lisp, including their quantum virtual machine and quantum compiler. (video, paper, github)
• Screenshotbot
  • Visual Testing as a service. Get notified on Pull Requests when your code changes your UI, mobile or web. Built with LispWorks.
• SRI International
  • client-sponsored R&D. Menlo Park, CA. SRI International offers innovative tools for modeling and analyzing genomes, metabolic pathways, and regulatory networks to support activities in drug discovery, agriculture, and biotechnology
  • Hiring scientific CL programmers. See also Artificial Intelligence Center. They have lots of Lisp-related links on their site as well.
  • also an Allegro CL success story.
• Smart Information Flow Technologies
  • Contract research house. Minneapolis, MN. Mission objective: “Getting information where it belongs when it’s needed.” Hiring AI professionals to support human control of complex systems. Research areas include: Planning, Plan recognition, Intelligent UserInterfaces, Information Presentation and Management and Computational Etiquette. Have at least one product at opensource – Simple Hierarchical Ordered Planner 2 (SHOP2).
• ThirdLaw Molecular, "A Groundbreaking New Platform for Targeted Drug Discovery".
  • founded by Christian Schafmeister and Martin Cracauer, the CLASP and Cando developers, ThirdLaw provides support and services for computational chemistry.
• Tiltontec
  • a student-driven Algebra learning system.
  • Common Lisp projects by Kenneth Tilton, like Cells, an implementation of the dataflow programming paradigm. NYC.
• Triton Systems inc. - a Global Business Venture company that successfully launches innovative products and solutions in emerging markets worldwide.
  • "For several years now, Triton has been harnessing the extraordinary power and flexibility of Common Lisp, and more specifically the Allegro CL platform, to research and rapidly develop cutting-edge approaches for the implementation of advanced embedded AI prototypes." Panos Lekkas, VP - AI Systems, at Triton Systems, Inc.
• Web Checkout - Equipement management & asset tracking software.
  • they were hiring in 2022.
  • "We have been a lisp shop since the 90s, starting off on CMUCL but porting to SBCL over a decade ago now."
  • "While the back-end core of our application is implemented in SBCL, the front end is AngularJS. We don't shy away from other technologies. Some back end services are implemented in Java or NodeJS; whatever make the most sense. We use Postmodern for persistence. Being a scheduling application the local-time library is a big deal for us."
• Wukix
  • vendor of the MOCL implementation for mobile and OSX.

Canada

• Amarc.radio
  • organization supporting community radio broadcasting. Montreal, Canada. Job page mentions Scheme, web development, and graphics.
• D-Wave Systems Inc.
  • The Quantum Computing Company (trademark). The world's first company to sell quantum computers. Wikipedia Page
• HexstreamSoft
  • Public Domain Common Lisp R&D.
  • Active as of October 2020.

Mexico

• Ikkiware
  • Developing a entrepreneurs oriented Social Network, huuii.com which includes project management and productivity tools called Huuii Smart and Huuii People as a social network, Huuii Polls as a Polls tool and Huuii Sites as web site creator tool use SBCL, some of their post about Common Lisp.

Europe

Belgium

• 3E

  • Provides "consultancy services and software products to improve the performance of sustainable energy systems and optimize energy consumption". The real-time data aggregation and alerting engines of its Synaptic product is Common Lisp based.
  • job announce 2023

• Pepite

  • Advanced analytics to improve the durability, sustainability, and resilience of the manufacturing sector.
  • they use Allegro CL.

Denmark

• SteelSeries ApS
  • Makes gaming accessories such as headsets, keyboards and mice. Games can integrate with these through the SteelSeries Engine using GoLisp, their open source Lisp written in Go, which aims to be compatible with MIT/GNU Scheme.

England

• EsseSystems
  • "The world’s leading expert in providing business solutions".
  • creating a CAS platform with generative and intuitive capabilities.
  • was hiring on October, 2023 (with a message on the Common Lisp LinkedIn group).
• Greater Skies
  • "The original map of the sky as seen from a place and time of your choice, since 2006"
  • comments on HackerNews.
• LispWorks Ltd
  • The company sells software written using Common Lisp. Their main products, LispWorks and Liquid Common Lisp, are Lisp development tools. Their primary business is support and development of these tools. They also provide consultancy services to companies needing implementation of software projects.
  • since 2005. LispWorks Ltd was formed to continue and grow the Lisp business formerly owned by Xanalys Corporation (previously owned by Global Graphics and originating with Harlequin). LispWorks Ltd comprises the Lisp team who were previously with Xanalys.
• Opusmodus Ltd
  • Building an award-winning music composition software.
• Virtual Insurance Products Ltd
  • Insurance MGA with a bespoke business to business web platform (with some customer facing parts) written in Common Lisp.
  • Active as of November 2020
  • http://insurevip.co.uk and Github account
  • Currently (November 2020) looking to hire CL developer(s)
• Kina knowledge
  • automates the processing of documents.
  • "We use Common Lisp extensively in our document processing software core for classification, extraction and other aspects of our service delivery and technology stack." See Lisp Interview: questions to Alex Nygren (from #66).
  • active as of October 2021

France

• Alstom
  • Alstom's Smartlock Interlocking system uses Allegro CL:
  • "All the Allegro CL-based software is used with other software as part of one application suite, which is a 'generic' system used for the preparation of configuration data for two of Alstom's railway signalling interlocking products." source
• Inetum Modernisation Solutions - "modernization solutions to successfully transition from legacy systems to digital technologies"
  • "My main work environment is an IDE for a proprietary language, called Refine, based on Lisp and currently implemented on top of LispWorks. It used to be developed and maintained by Reasoning, but this company has disappeared long ago and we have acquired the intellectual property of Refine. Since the language and IDE are rather old, the IDE is based on Emacs. The interface runs the Refine process (a LispWorks image) in an inferior shell and uses various Emacs communication tricks to provide services such as compilation from the editor window, etc."
  • source: LispWorks mailing list, 2024.
• Planisware, a web based Product and Project Management (PPM) solution, using Allegro CL.
  • used by over 250 of the Forbes Global 2000 companies
  • Nicolas Vilars, Marketing Director, says "Allegro CL is an incredibly good language to develop true versatile, clever applications. Allegro CL is used mainly to interpret the rules included in Planisware 5, and enables the company to quickly design powerful functions." "Planisware is the fastest growing application in its category (PPM), due largely to the outstanding design flexibility enabled by Lisp." says Vilars. source
• Sony Computer Science Laboratories Paris, VUB Artificial Intelligence Laboratory in Brussels
  • developed an open source framework in Common Lisp for conducting experiments on language evolution: Babel. Their Gitlab: https://gitlab.ai.vub.ac.be/ehai/babel-core. Source.

Germany

• bevuta IT GmbH

  • bevuta IT aims to be a technological leader and close to current scientific developments, focusing on objectively good technologies instead of current trends. The company employs the founder and core developers of the CHICKEN Scheme project.

• CoCreate

  • 3D CAD modeler for “explicit modeling”. Sindelfingen, Germany. 1M+ lines of Lisp, previously part of HP, paper on Common Lisp as an Embedded Extension Language. Recent blog post about CL use

• Cognesys ☒

  • “automatic ascertainment and further processing of verbal and text messages” (Natural Language Processing). Ubach-Palenburg, Germany. Looking for experienced and fresh Lisp programmers

• Dydra, a "powerful graph database in the cloud, allowing your business to make the most of highly connected data, such as social networks."

  • released cl-ndbapi, Common Lisp bindings to the C++ NDBAPI of RonDB.
  • "We use it to write a new backend based on RonDB for our GraphDatabase Dydra, that is mostly written in CommonLisp. We wrote the library cl-ndbapi to efficiently talk to RonDB from CommonLisp via the C++ NDBAPI."
  • "On top of this, Dydradata will give you a SparQL endpoint, efficiency for complex queries, revisioned repositories, and more."
  • Twitter, 2022.

• MTU Aero Engines

  • MTU Aero Engines is Germany's leading engine manufacturer and an established global player in the industry. It engages in the development, manufacture, marketing and support of commercial and military aircraft engines in all thrust and power categories and industrial gas turbines. They use Allegro CL.

• m-creations

  • Custom software solutions for mid-size to big companies in finance/payment, health care, and media. Using Common Lisp in different fields ranging from dynamic web applications and Natural Language Processing to systems engineering infrastructure in container clusters (DNS, dynamic load balancer).

• stk-hamburg

  • developing an ERP in Lisp (ECL 2018 lightning talk).

Italy

• Fast-Square - complete supply chain management software suite for steel service centers
  • their Coil Cut Optimizer product is written in Allegro CL. source.

Netherlands

• Infometrics
  • Automatic Functional Sizing. Muiderberg, Netherlands. Analyzes requirements and design documents for business software to make a Function Point Analysis. Sole proprietorship (Ernst van Waning) using Allegro/Lispworks.

Norway

• Northphonic, heavy duty VoIP Telephones,
  • building Evacsound, a tunnel evacuation system: "Norphonic introduces a novel distributed system for assisted evacuation from automotive and railway tunnels, mineral mines and industrial passageways."
  • " We are using CL in prod for an embedded system (evacsound.com) for some years now, fairly smooth sailing. It started out as an MVP/prototype so implementation was of no concern, then gained enough velocity and market interest that a rewrite was infeasible. We re-train talent on the job instead." Seen on HN, 2022.
• Selvaag
  • home building, real estate management, developing IT tools for industrial housing construction. Oslo, Norway. Developed the BlueThink knowledge management tools for housing construction planning.

Poland

• TurtleWare
  • A software (and Common Lisp) consulting boutique. Run by Daniel Kochmański, who maintains Embeddable Common Lisp.

Portugal

• SISCOG
  • decision-support systems for resource planning and management in transportation companies. Lisboa, Portugal. Allegro CL since version 5 – before that it was Lucid Lisp.
  • with an interview (2024)
  • "We use Common Lisp in the vast majority of our software. Both desktop applications and backend parts of web applications are implemented in Common Lisp."
  • "It remains to be said that our products have been in operation for more than 30 years in various national and international companies, such as the London and Lisbon Underground, or the railways of the Netherlands or Canada."

Russia

• SberBank
  • SberBank is the largest bank in Russia, Central and Eastern Europe, and one of the leading financial institutions worldwide. Uses Common Lisp(SBCL) as a backend in a Metadata Management System for an internal cybersecurity big data.

Spain

• RavenPack
  • RavenPack is the leading big data analytics provider for financial services. Lots of NLP and multi-threaded, distributed systems programming in CL (Allegro CL). Marbella, Spain. Actively searching for CL (senior and junior) developers.

Sweden

• Anaphoric
  • natural language interface for relational databases. Umeå, Sweden. Including Michael Minock of Umeå University. Downloadable demo of their CatchPhrase product. 20K lines of Clisp code.
• Doremir Music Research AB
  • Developing ScoreCloud, a music notation software (a LispWorks product). Stockholm.

Switzerland

• Shirakumo / Yukari Hafner
  • Developed Kandria, a post-apocalyptic hack & slash platformer game.
  • Many other open source libraries and projects for game development and web development.
  • We can support them on Patreon and GitHub sponsors.

Ukraine

• Keepit
  • a cloud-to-cloud backup service provider. Was hiring two Common Lisp developers in October, 2020.

Africa

South Africa

• Managing Transformation Solutions
  • Insite is a flexible, cloud-based social performance management platform that enables users to streamline the collection and validation of social sustainability data. The result is reporting on social performance requirements that is as reliable as the reporting out of accounting systems.
  • Started in 2009 MTS has been using Common Lisp for development from day one.
  • Development is done in Common Lisp except for the odd JS script.
  • Developed a object database written in Common Lisp for lighting fast queries.

Asia

India

• deftask
  • task management app for teams
  • deftask backend and the command-line app are written in CL.

Korea

• Mind.ai
  • Developing the next generation of symbolic AI systems
  • Uses LispWorks

Japan

• Mathematical Systems, Inc
  • scientific software, computer science, internet solutions, social systems. Tokyo, Japan. Their Car Crash Database System (using Allegro) lets engineers browse over 1TB of numerical, photo, and video data about car crashes to design safer cars (used by Honda). If you know Japanese, they have a page called “Why Common Lisp?” (translation appreciated).
• Pocket Change Inc.
  • Pocket Change is an innovative service. It converts leftover coins and bills to electronic money, gift codes, and coupons of your choice.
  • Pocket Change uses Common Lisp in their exchange machine. Eitaro Fukamachi is Lead Engineer here.
  • Github projects
• t-cool
  • a non-profit organization that organizes events where Lispers gather

Virtual or Unsure of Location

• Feetr.io "is entirely lisp".
  • Feetr is "an algorithm which understands momentum in the stock market, and finds where that momentum is flowing to find stocks with a good chance of really high gains. It averaged 9.17% daily increase across 127 stocks last month (tweet)".
  • "Common Lisp was a conscious decision because it allows a small team to be incredibly productive, plus the fact that it's a live image allows you to connect to it over the internet and poke and prod the current state, which has really allowed a much clearer understanding of the data."
  • Soure: HN, 2022. They post SLY screenshots on their Twitter^^ https://twitter.com/0xsmcn/status/1598665401633759233/photo/1
• GeneNetwork uses GNU Guix and scheme extensively in production.
• the PostgreSQL organization uses Common Lisp in at least two products:
  • pgloader (see why it was rewritten from Python), and
  • pgcharts.
• Pandora Bots - Chatbots with Character.
  • "Easily bring your chatbots to life with real-time animation integrations."
  • "many of [PandoraBots] strengths come from the power and straightforwardness of AIML and a Lisp-based parsing and translatingi engine". Seen on https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/9740557 interview of Fritz Kunze, founder of Franz, Inc.
  • San Francisco, Tokyo, London.
• Raytheon SigLab
  • a signal processing analysis pipeline for developing algorithms. A LispWorks success story.
• Untyped
  • web applications, custom software development, training. Virtual Office (5 people). PLT Scheme, very good blog
• Utilitymage
  • In Utility Mage (Umage) the aim is to make as much of the utility management process transparent. This allows both utility managers and the invoiced entity access to the relevant data like invoices, trend reports, exception reports and audit trails, such as photos of meter readings. As of may 2018, it is a startup still in Health mode. Umage is built in Common Lisp.
• Modern Interpreters Inc.
  • building screenshotbot, an open-source, mobile-first automated screenshot testing. Written primarily with LispWorks, works also on CCL.
  • Active as of July, 2021

Contributors

Guidelines to contribute

Please follow this format of the list, if you want to make a contribution.

• [Company name](#link)
  • description. addditional information.
• Put the name of the company and link to its homepage in the list.
• Write a description and additional description for the company.
• Make sure it is put under the appropriate location.
• If the company doesn't fit in any existing location, make a new one for it.
• Ensure everything is alphabetically sorted.

Credit

• This list derived from Peter Christensen work with his kind permission.

License

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

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