Minitap has raised $4.1 million in seed funding to enhance its mobile-development platform into a new phase of growth, with backing from investors who believe the company is solving one of the sector’s most stubborn delays; the slow pace of building and testing mobile features.
The round was co-led by Moxxie Ventures and Mercuri, joined by EWOR, Tekton Ventures, Amigos Venture Capital and six unicorn founders.
Their support comes only months after the company’s two young founders topped AndroidWorld, an influential benchmark for mobile-device automation, beating long-established research groups from Google DeepMind, ByteDance, Microsoft Research and Alibaba.
Unlike web developers, mobile teams usually wait weeks to push even small updates through. Minitap argues that this drag has held the industry back for years.
The company says its platform lets teams work at a pace closer to the web, cutting feature-delivery cycles from six weeks to a few days.
Nicolas Dehandschoewercker, Minitap’s co-founder and CEO, said the long delays in mobile development impacted their motivation. “We spent two years building our first viral mobile product, today, and I’m embarrassed by that timeline,” he said. He added that “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.”
His co-founder, Luc Mahoux-Nakamura, stressed the need for faster testing across consumer apps. “Every consumer mobile company needs to experiment faster. The companies that run 10x more experiments will win their markets. We’re building the infrastructure that makes that speed possible.”
The pair grew up in a small village in Burgundy, studied side by side, and later built several projects together before launching Minitap. Their path included early products, time in military school, engineering research, and work on drone infrastructure, an experience they now say gave them a rare mix of skills.
Investors appear to agree. Daniel Dippold, founder and CEO of EWOR, described the team’s speed and technical range as a competitive advantage.
“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 platform is built on two key components: mobile-use, an open-source framework that allows automated systems to operate smartphones like real users; and minitap cloud, an infrastructure capable of spinning up thousands of mobile configurations at once.
Together, these tools help teams generate code, test it across devices, flag errors, and deliver working features far faster than traditional workflows.
Their speedy progress on AndroidWorld brought attention earlier this year. Within their first 40 days, they reached the top of the benchmark and later released their framework openly, drawing more than 1,900 GitHub stars.
The seed round also attracted founders behind companies such as Hugging Face, Last.fm, Adjust, SumUp, FlixBus and Worldcoin, alongside operators from OpenAI, DeepMind, LangChain and LlamaIndex. Investors say the founders’ momentum was difficult to overlook.
Katie Jacobs Stanton of Moxxie Ventures said: “When you see two 23-year-olds from rural France beat Google in 40 days, you recognize something rare. Nico and Luc are solving a massive problem that they uniquely understand and are moving at an urgent speed.”
Today, Minitap is being used by consumer mobile teams that want to run more experiments without expanding their engineering headcount. The company says its tools will eventually allow product managers to describe a feature, drop in a design, and have code generated and tested in a single afternoon.
Mercuri partner Esha Vatsa believes the long-term potential is vital. “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.”
Minitap founders say their vision is to enable the development of mobile apps that adapt themselves automatically, running experiments, studying user behaviour, generating improvements and rolling out new versions with minimal human involvement.
