With the advent of generative AI, AI applications are transforming and reshaping various industries and changing how people work. Software development is no exception.
The relatively young artificial intelligence application testing startup Autify confirmed a significant capital injection to QA Financial as the San Francisco-based firm said it has secured fresh investments from a private equity player and a VC firm.
Autify disclosed that $13 million in fresh funding is coming its way, as Globis Capital Partners and LG Technology Ventures have come on board as new investors, alongside existing backers Salesforce Ventures, Archetype Venture, Uncorrelated Ventures and World Innovation Lab (WIL).
The latest funding brings Autify’s total war chest to around $30 million, consisting of $24 million in equity and roughly $6 million in debt financing.
Satoshi Fukushima
Investor Satoshi Fukushima, a partner of Globis Capital Partner, explained why his firm embraces Autify as an investment proposition.
“Development agility has become a prerequisite for all companies’ evolution,” he stated.
“Autify’s product not only automates testing but also commits to improving the overall development process, simultaneously achieving both quality enhancement and acceleration of outputs, and we believe this contributes significantly to productivity improvement worldwide.”
When asked to elaborate, Fukushima said that “as a platform, Autify liberates development resources, including engineers, to focus on ‘true work’, and it goes beyond ‘business efficiency’ to achieve ‘value addition’.”
New solution
Alongside the news about the capital raise, Autify, which also has an office in Tokyo, said it has developed and launched an autonomous AI agent for software quality assurance.
The solution helps software engineers complete coding more swiftly and efficiently, the company claimed, thereby streamlining workflows and boosting productivity.
The firm stated its new product should be seen as “an AI QA engineer for software engineers.”
Autify was launched in 2016 by two former software engineers, Ryo Chikazawa, who is the current CEO, and Sam Yamashita.
They went on to roll out a platform called Autify NoCode, which allows developers and QA teams to boost efficiency and speed up the software quality engineering process, thereby saving time and resources.
“Companies that have been heavily investing in automation by writing code don’t need to adapt to no-code/[low-code] because they can code.”
– Ryo Chikazawa
The product saw a significant uptake in South Korea and Japan, where many developers still heavily depend on manual testing.
The platform’s popularity in North America was modest, however. Exactly for that reason Autify went on to build Zenes, its new AI QA engineering solution.
“Zenes generates test cases by analysing product requirement documents, writes automated test codes and maintains the test codes automatically,” Chikazawa claimed, as he added that it significantly brings down the time to create test cases, by mor than half.
“Companies that have been heavily investing in automation by writing code don’t need to adapt to no-code/[low-code] because they can code,” he noted.
“However, they are still suffering from the lack of resources,” Chikazawa continued, adding that the companies expect generative AI to make their work more productive.
“With the launch of Zenes, now we can capture an even earlier stage of software quality assurance which is designing and creating test cases and we will be able to provide a comprehensive end-to-end solution for the entire QA process.”
Chikazawa believes that “AI is not here to replace humans. It’s here to enhance human capability so that we can be more creative.”
“The software development process and its quality assurance will be redefined with generative AI,” he concluded.
Looking ahead
The startup plans to use the new capital to roll more AI features to enhance its software QA solutions.
Moreover, Autify has teamed up with LGCNS, the IT service unit of electronics giant LG Corp, primarily to push further into the Korean market, where it has a large following.
Shumpei Fukui
The firm is currently active in about 16 countries and employs around 100 people.
This number will soon shoot up, if it is up to investor Shumpei Fukui, the managing partner of Archetype Ventures, one of Autify’s key investors.
“It has been over a decade since it was said that software would swallow the world, this trend has become reality, and with the addition of AI, the trend is accelerating,” he said.
“Under these circumstances, the fundamental competitiveness of software has shifted to quality, and even beyond that, quality is now a given,” Fukui shared.
“In a development environment that is evolving at an astonishing pace, there is a very strong need for QA to evolve to ensure quality,” he concluded.