Mobile development is notoriously slow, but Minitap’s platform promises to cut development time from six weeks to days. This advancement is crucial for consumer app companies that need to keep up with rapid web development speeds. However, every delay impacts growth as consumer apps lose users if features arrive late, and iteration falls behind the pace of real-time market expectations. This gap became the central challenge that Minitap set out to solve.
Minitap, a San Francisco-based AI startup, has raised $4.2 million in seed funding. It was led by Moxxie Ventures and Mercuri, with participation from EWOR, Tekton Ventures, Amigos Venture Capital, and six unicorn founders and AI infrastructure leaders from companies like Hugging Face, SumUp, Adjust, Last.fm, and FlixBus.
The round comes just four months after founders Nico and Luc, both 23, achieved the #1 position globally on AndroidWorld, the industry benchmark for AI-controlled mobile devices, surpassing research teams from Google DeepMind, ByteDance, Microsoft Research, and Alibaba.
Code that builds, tests and ships itself
Minitap’s platform reduces development cycles from six weeks to days by letting AI write mobile code, run it on real devices, detect bugs, fix them, and ship working features autonomously. Its infrastructure spins up any device configuration across thousands of phones in parallel, something traditional AI coding assistants cannot do.
This gives engineering teams a shortcut to production not by cutting corners, but by cutting manual repetition out of the loop entirely. In live deployments, consumer app teams are already launching features 10x faster than before.
The story behind the breakthrough
Founders Nicolas Dehandschoewercker and Luc Mahoux-Nakamura, both 23, grew up in a small village in Burgundy, France. Luc was known as a child prodigy, while Nico came from a military school. Luc taught Nico how to code, and the duo spent years pushing their limits academically until both ranked in the top 0.1% in France.
They shipped their first app at 18, hit 10,000 users, and went on to pursue divergent paths – Imperial College AI research for Nico, drone infrastructure at Rakuten for Luc, only to reunite with a shared ambition to reinvent mobile development. Their advantage is the way they operate as a long-term unit, treating problem-solving like a competitive sport.
Apps that build themselves
The team expects that within five years, growth teams won’t need engineering support to test ideas. A product manager will describe a feature, upload a Figma design, and AI will release an A/B test the same afternoon.
The long-term vision goes further: mobile apps that optimise themselves, generating hypotheses, experimenting, iterating, and improving without human direction. If Minitap succeeds, mobile development won’t just become faster, but it will become autonomous.
“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 at Mercuri.
“When you see two 23-year-olds from rural France beat Google in 40 days, you recognise something rare,” said Katie Jacobs Stanton, Founder and General Partner at Moxxie Ventures. “Nico and Luc are solving a massive problem that they uniquely understand and are moving at an urgent speed.”
“We spent two years building our first viral mobile product, today, and I’m embarrassed by that timeline,” said Nicolas Dehandschoewercker, co-founder and CEO of Minitap. “Mobile is 60% of internet usage, but moves at 10% of web speed. Every consumer app company (Duolingo, Calm, Hing,e etc) ships 5x more experiments on web than mobile. We built Minitap to close that gap for everyone.”
“Every consumer mobile company needs to experiment faster,” added Luc Mahoux-Nakamura. “The companies that run 10x more experiments will win their markets. We’re building the infrastructure that makes that speed possible.”
