New York-based Mobot has publicly launched its QA-as-a-service platform and closed $12.5 million in Series A funding. The round was led by Cota Capital (that recently backed Token.io) with participation from Heavybit, Uncorrelated Ventures, and others.
Growth plans on cards
Mobot intends to use the funds to accelerate growth and expand operations.
“The limitations of QA software mean too many people hours are burned testing mobile apps to make sure they ship right the first time. Mobot’s non-obvious insight to use physical robots for manual testing is an ingenious solution,” said Adit Singh, partner at Cota Capital. “Its fleet of robots are more reliable and do the job with accuracy and consistency. Mobot helps eliminate tedious, manual testing so customers can ship their mobile apps with confidence, every time.”
“Real-world quality testing is critical to building mobile applications that people love and to making digital transformation initiatives successful. Unfortunately, real-world testing is also an expensive and repetitive task that humans don’t like and can be pretty bad at,” said Jesse Robbins, partner at Heavybit. “Mobot gives quality people at every software company a powerful team of helpful robots to do world-class testing at scale, across devices and ecosystems, in a matter of hours.”
How was Mobot born?
Mobot was founded by Eden Full Goh in 2018 in New York after a decade of experience in engineering and product. She dropped out of Princeton to build SunSaluter, a low-cost solar panel rotator used in developing countries around the world, with an entrepreneurship fellowship from The Thiel Foundation. After realising the long hours spent manually testing software on mobile devices, she started Mobot to address what she saw as a huge gap no one was talking about.
“Software is increasingly physical, and that means testing in a vacuum doesn’t cut it anymore. But using humans to do real-world regression testing is a poor use of their creativity and potential,” said Eden Full Goh, founder and CEO at Mobot. “Robots do these jobs faster, more accurately, and can easily handle the fragmentation of software across devices and ecosystems. We’re building the infrastructure that helps modern companies adapt to our device-dependent world.”
Robots to debug apps
Mobile users today interact with numerous physical devices, notifications, integrations, operating systems, and thousands of other points outside developer control. Emulators and other virtual QA environments are unable to test the formidable number of edge cases that cause breakdowns in performance and functionality.
Mobot solves this problem with the only QA-as-a-service platform that uses state-of-the-art mechanical robots to automate testing of repetitive, human-like functions in a real-world setting. This approach eliminates thousands of hours of manual testing, increases testing efficiency exponentially, and captures more bugs in-app before app store launches than software can do alone.
Mobot’s clientele
Mobot’s first-of-its-kind platform uses physical robots to battle test mobile applications. Companies serving millions of users, including Citizen, Persona, Branch, Mapbox, and Radar, use Mobot to test apps on hundreds of devices, platforms, and operating systems within hours.
“Mobot has helped us increase our App Store rating from 4.2 to 4.8 and achieve a 99.9% crash-free rate,” said Swamy Ramaswamy, CTO and COO at Sandboxx. “Our app is responsible for helping military service members send and receive physical letters with family, so stability is crucial. Mobot is a critical part of our QA workflow and regularly uncovers issues that weren’t surfaced by our internal software testing process.”