The race to automate mobile app development has received a significant boost. Minitap, an AI-driven startup, has secured $4.1 million in seed funding to accelerate its platform. The company promises to drastically reduce the time required to launch new mobile features, potentially reshaping how companies like Duolingo, Calm, and Hinge – all cited by Minitap – approach mobile development compared to their web-based counterparts.
This seed round, co-led by EWOR and Tekton Ventures, indicates strong confidence in Minitap’s vision. Participation from investors like Amigos Venture Capital and unicorn founders from companies like Hugging Face, SumUp, and Last.fm further validates the company’s potential.
Minitap aims to bridge the productivity gap between web and mobile development. Co-founders Nicolas Dehandschoewercker and Luc Mahoux-Nakamura, both 23, contend that while AI coding tools have revolutionized web development, mobile development has lagged due to the complexities of the mobile ecosystem.
Their solution is a two-pronged approach:
- mobile-use: An open-source framework that allows AI agents to interact with smartphones as a human would.
- Minitap Cloud: A platform that generates thousands of phone configurations in parallel, enabling comprehensive testing across diverse devices.
By connecting these capabilities to AI coding environments, Minitap enables AI to autonomously write mobile code, test it on real hardware, identify bugs, and deploy functional features. The founders claim this can reduce development cycles from six weeks to mere days.
Outperforming Tech Giants
Minitap’s early success is noteworthy. Within its first 40 days, the platform reportedly outperformed research teams from Google DeepMind and other major tech firms on AI-related industry benchmarks. They also achieved the top rank on AndroidWorld, a benchmark for AI’s ability to control mobile devices. The open-sourcing of their framework quickly garnered 1,900 stars on GitHub.
Dehandschoewercker and Mahoux-Nakamura’s story is as compelling as their technology. The pair, who met in Cosne-Cours-sur-Loire, Burgundy, launched their first mobile app at 18. Before Minitap, Dehandschoewercker studied Biomedical Engineering at Imperial College London and worked in AI research, while Mahoux-Nakamura built delivery drone systems at Rakuten. This diverse experience seems to have given them a unique edge.
Nicolas Dehandschoewercker, Co-Founder and CEO of Minitap, stated: “We spent two years building our first viral mobile product, today, and I’m embarrassed. 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.”
Investors are impressed by Minitap’s rapid progress and the founders’ unique skill set.
Daniel Dippold, Founder and CEO of EWOR, noted: 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.
Minitap’s ambition extends beyond simply speeding up development. Their roadmap includes platforms that further automate mobile app optimization, including self-generating and iterating on features without human intervention. The ultimate goal is a fully autonomous system where AI handles coding, testing, and deployment.
Esha Vatsa, Partner at Mercuri, commented: “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.”
If Minitap succeeds, it could fundamentally alter the mobile app landscape, empowering even non-technical teams to rapidly experiment and iterate on new features. This could lead to a new era of mobile innovation, driven by the power of AI.
