In 2024, the majority of software development is shifting to no-code tools and AI-generated code. The latest research points to the low quality of AI-generated code. Poor code leads to app failures, revenue loss, and skyrocketing costs to clean up the mess. AI will churn out even more apps in the future. It will require tools that can handle much bigger volumes much faster – and that’s where Octomind comes in.
US-based Octomind has raised $4.8 million six months after emerging from stealth. The round was led by European early-stage venture capital firm Cherry Ventures (invested in Planet A Ventures and Saleor.io). Also, angels such as Sean Mullaney of Algolia, Charlie Songhurst (ex-Microsoft), and Lutz Finger (ex-Linkedin, ex-Snapchat) participated in this round.
The fresh capital will go towards building stability and trust in AI-based testing and transforming web testing with generative AI.
Idea behind Octomind
Testing was a critical part of the development routine in these companies, but no good solution existed to automate the process. They had to invest heavily in manual quality assurance. That’s when Octomind’s founders – Marc Mengler, who has been developing web apps to bring his AI research to users since 2015, and Daniel Roedler, who was previously responsible for GoToMeeting and AI data labeling products at Understand.ai, formed the company in 2024.
It is a developer tool using AI to make automated end-to-end testing stable, fast, and affordable. All we need is your URL. With the help of AI, it will discover, generate, run, and auto-fix your end-to-end tests. It is committed to redefining testing so that software builders can focus on building.
AI-based testing
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% valid. That’s why 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.
“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,” said Marc Mengler, co-founder and CEO.
“We all come from building applications that had to run flawlessly 24/7 for customers all over the world. 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,” added Daniel Roedler, co-founder and CTO.
“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. Thanks to their impressive experience and well-advanced AI agent product, I believe Octomind will make developers love software testing soon,” said Jasper Masemann, partner at Cherry Ventures.
