German testing startup Octomind has received fresh allocations from a range of international investors, the company’s founders shared with QA Financial.
In total, the firm has collected $4.8 million to invest in the expansion of its relatively young but popular AI-powered web testing platform.
The Karlsruhe, Germany-based tester, which has also an office in Palo Alto, California, has skyrocketed in the last twelve months.
Among its investors are established names such as former Microsoft executive and angel investor Charlie Songhurts, Soren Bramer Schmidt, the CEO of Prisma, ex-snap and ex-LinkedIn investor Lutz Finger, WakaTime founder Alan Hamlett, Ultimate CEO Reetu Kainulainen as well as Hadrian CTO Prash Somaiya.
The firm is also backed by a range of large, global investment firms such as Cherry Ventures, TKM, HashiCorp and KfW Capital.
“Our ultimate goal is a world where software testing is not a dreaded task.”
– Marc Mengler
The power of Octomind’s product lies in a platform that has been adopted by a host of banks, insurance firms and other financial services firms, allowing their in-house QA teams to identify bugs and flaws.
“Thanks to no-code tools and AI, [every business] can generate web apps. But that’s not the full story,” explained Marc Mengler, co-founder and CEO.
Mengler co-founded the company in 2015 with Daniel Roedler, primarily “out of frustration with the status quo in software testing.”
Roedler said that “we all come from building applications that had to run flawlessly 24/7 for customers worldwide. We wanted to address something that bugged us the whole time there.”
However, “testing every release to ensure we didn’t break the app was a major pain and slowed us down. Luckily, we knew AI and how to bend it to working applications. It was a no-brainer.”
AI integration
Roedler stressed that the biggest challenge of AI-based testing is combining the deterministic nature of tests with non-deterministic AI. Developers need to ensure that the test code is 100 per cent valid.
Consequently, Octomind has integrated AI while more established systems take care of the coding.
The firm’s AI agent is able to scrutinise, read and analyse any web app it encounters, and makes recommendations relevant to the company’s work flows.
This approach promoted Jasper Masemann, partner at Cherry Ventures, to allocate funds to the German firm.
“Octomind addresses one of the world’s largest. $38 billion and least automated markets that can be augmented by AI,” he said.
“Today, software testing is the single most hated task for developers. Yet, more and more CTOs expect devs to do the testing themselves, which grows the total market to $184 billion worldwide,” Masemann added.
“I believe Octomind will make developers love software testing soon,” he stated.
“Today, software testing is the single most hated task for developers.”
– Jasper Masemann
Mengler said in agreement that this is the firm’s “ultimate goal”, namely “a world where software testing is not a dreaded task but a seamless part of the development process, thanks to AI.
He stressed he believes “in a future where developers can focus on what they do best – building incredible software – while leaving the tedious task of testing to an intelligent system capable of auto-fixing bugs as they arise.”
He added that “this fresh injection of capital will be pivotal in enhancing our AI’s ability to understand and navigate web applications, identifying and testing critical user flows with precision.
“We’re not just talking about slapping together some code; we’re about creating a seamless, bug-free user experience that stands the test of real-world application,” Mengler concluded.
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