AI firm Minitap has secured USD $4.1 million in seed funding for its platform designed to accelerate mobile software development.
The company's founders, both aged 23, say their technology allows engineering teams to ship mobile features much faster than traditional methods, addressing a longstanding productivity gap compared to web development.
Seed round details
The seed round was co-led by Moxxie Ventures and Mercuri, with additional participation from investors including EWOR, Tekton Ventures, Amigos Venture Capital, and six unicorn founders from companies such as Hugging Face, SumUp, and Last.fm.
According to the company, the investment follows rapid technical progress, as Minitap outperformed research teams from Google DeepMind and other major technology firms on AI-related industry benchmarks within the first 40 days of its platform going live.
Technical innovations
Minitap's technology comprises two main components: an open-source framework called mobile-use, which enables AI agents to control smartphones as a human would, and Minitap cloud, which can generate any phone configuration across thousands of devices in parallel. The system links these capabilities to AI coding environments, lets artificial intelligence write mobile code, test it on real hardware, identify issues, and autonomously roll out functional features.
Within its initial operating weeks, Minitap achieved the top rank on AndroidWorld, a benchmark for measuring AI's ability to control mobile devices. The founders then open-sourced their framework, attracting 1,900 stars on GitHub.
Productivity claims
The founders of Minitap argue that, despite the growth of AI in coding tools for web development, mobile feature shipping remains significantly slower. Desktop applications such as Cursor and Claude have enabled much faster iteration for websites, but similar tools for mobile development have lagged due to the additional complexity of testing and validating features across the fragmented mobile ecosystem.
"We spent two years building our first viral mobile product, today, and I'm embarrassed by that timeline. Mobile is 60% of internet usage but moves at 10% of web speed. Every consumer app company (Duolingo, Calm, Hinge etc) ships 5x more experiments on web than mobile. We built Minitap to close that gap for everyone," said Nicolas Dehandschoewercker, Co-Founder and CEO, Minitap.
Minitap claims that engineering teams using its platform can reduce development cycles for new features from six weeks to just days. The ambition is to allow non-engineering "growth" teams to deploy and test features through the use of AI, bypassing the need for direct engineering input in many cases.
Founder background
Nicolas Dehandschoewercker and Luc Mahoux-Nakamura met in Cosne-Cours-sur-Loire, Burgundy, and have collaborated closely for seven years. They launched their first mobile app at 18 and grew it organically. Before founding Minitap, Dehandschoewercker studied Biomedical Engineering at Imperial College London and worked in AI research, while Mahoux-Nakamura built delivery drone systems at Rakuten.
They say their joint experience in mobile development, AI research, and building at scale provided them with a distinct advantage. Their success in surpassing established research labs on industry benchmarks has attracted the attention of both venture capital and technical operators across the AI ecosystem.
Industry reaction
Investors cite the team's speed and combination of skills as crucial factors in tackling longstanding industry challenges.
"Nicolas is leading one of the fastest teams I've seen. It comes from years of working together, knowing mobile inside out, and understanding how to build AI systems that hold up. The combination of AI research capabilities, mobile development skills, and sheer hunger of will is unprecedented and ideal for solving this specific problem," said Daniel Dippold, Founder and CEO, EWOR.
Future outlook
Minitap's roadmap involves developing platforms that further automate the process of mobile app optimisation, including self-generating and iterating on features without human intervention. The company is targeting a scenario whereby product managers can specify new features and designs, leaving AI to handle coding, testing, and deployment processes autonomously.
"minitap is one of the first companies that is bringing agentic AI to mobile use and possibly the very first that is taking a full stack approach to enable the use of AI coding agents for mobile app development. This is a substantial challenge and a huge opportunity that Nico and Luc are uniquely positioned to solve," said Esha Vatsa, Partner, Mercuri.
