Minitap, the AI-driven mobile development platform, announced a $4.1 million seed funding round co-led by Moxxie Ventures and Mercuri, with participation from EWOR, Tekton Ventures, Amigos Venture Capital, and six unicorn founders. The announcement follows the company’s remarkable achievement of surpassing Google DeepMind, ByteDance, Microsoft Research, and Alibaba on the AndroidWorld benchmark within just 40 days.
Founded by 23-year-olds Nico Dehandschoewercker and Luc Mahoux-Nakamura from rural France, Minitap addresses one of the tech industry’s most persistent bottlenecks: mobile development, which remains 10 times slower than web development even with AI. While AI tools accelerate web feature deployment from weeks to days, mobile development lags behind due to testing challenges, device fragmentation, and iterative limitations. Minitap’s platform allows engineering teams to build, test, and ship mobile features in days rather than the usual six-week cycle.
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“Mobile is 60% of internet usage but moves at 10% of web speed,” said Nicolas Dehandschoewercker, co-founder and CEO. “Every consumer app company ships five times more experiments on web than mobile. Minitap closes that gap, enabling teams to experiment and iterate faster than ever.”
The platform’s technical innovations include Mobile-Use, an open-source framework that enables AI agents to control phones like humans, and Minitap Cloud, which spins up any iOS or Android configuration across thousands of devices in parallel. Integrated with AI coding environments, the tools allow AI to generate code, test features on real devices, detect and fix bugs, and ship working features autonomously.
Within their first 40 days, Minitap claimed the #1 spot on AndroidWorld, the industry benchmark for AI-controlled mobile devices, and open-sourced the solution, quickly amassing 1,900 stars on GitHub. The funding round drew high-profile investors including Thomas Wolf of Hugging Face, FlixBus founders Jochen Engert, Daniel Krauss and André Schwämmlein, and SumUp’s Petter Made, highlighting confidence in the startup’s disruptive potential.
Minitap is already used by consumer mobile companies to accelerate feature development up to ten times. Product managers can now describe a feature, provide a Figma design, and have AI generate, test, and deploy a fully functional A/B test in a single afternoon. Looking ahead, the company plans to build mobile apps capable of optimizing themselves autonomously, running experiments, analyzing user behavior, generating hypotheses, and iterating without human intervention.
“minitap is bringing agentic AI to mobile development at full stack scale,” said Esha Vatsa, Partner at Mercuri. “The combination of AI research expertise, mobile development skills, and relentless execution by Nico and Luc positions them to solve a challenge no other team can match.”
