Six months after emerging from stealth mode, German software company Octomind has raised $4.8 million to transform web testing with generative AI. 

Octomind has created a working AI agent that knows what to test, writes the tests, and keeps them up to date — all without human input, solely from looking at a website. It enables businesses to find bugs before customers do.

“Thanks to no-code tools and AI, everyone can generate web apps. But that’s not the full story. They also need an expert who guarantees that the generated code doesn’t contain bugs. We’ve built Octomind to be that testing expert,” says Marc Mengler, co-founder and CEO.

Founders Marc Mengler and Daniel Roedler, brought Octomind to life out of a shared frustration with the status quo in software testing. Mengler has been developing web apps to bring his AI research to users since 2015. Roedler was previously responsible for GoToMeeting and AI data labelling products at Understand.ai. 

These featured millions of users per day. Testing was a critical part of the development routine in these companies, but no good solution existed to automate the process, meaning a heavy investment in manual quality assurance.  

According to Daniel Roedler, co-founder and CTO:

“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.

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.”

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.

As a result, Octomind uses AI for its commonsense knowledge and leaves the code generation to more predictable systems. Its AI agent navigates through the web app, understands it, and identifies relevant user flows that need to work.

It mimics the user (e.g., clicks on the input field and enters email, clicks on sign-up to newsletter, etc.), records and stores the interaction chain. The corresponding test code is created deterministically without any hallucinations.

The round is led by Cherry Ventures and features angels such as Sean Mullaney of Algolia, Charlie Songhurst (ex-Microsoft) and Lutz Finger (ex-Linkedin, ex-Snapchat). 

Jasper Masemann, partner at Cherry Ventures, shared:

“Octomind addresses one of the world’s largest ($38B) and least automated markets that can be augmented by AI. 

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 $184B worldwide.

I believe Octomind will make developers love software testing soon.”

The fresh capital will go towards baking stability and trust into AI-based testing.

Lead image: Octomind. Photo: uncredited.