San Francisco, California: Minitap, an AI-powered platform designed to make mobile development significantly faster, has raised $4.1 million in seed funding.
The round was co-led by Moxxie Ventures and Mercuri, with support from EWOR, Tekton Ventures, Amigos Venture Capital, and six unicorn founders.
The announcement marks another milestone for Minitap, which recently achieved the top global ranking on AndroidWorld, surpassing research efforts from Google DeepMind, ByteDance, Microsoft Research, and Alibaba.
Minitap Aims to Speed Up Mobile Development
Mobile development continues to lag behind web development – often taking up to ten times longer – even in an era of advanced AI-assisted tools.
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While platforms like Cursor and Claude allow web engineers to deploy features within days, these solutions remain ineffective for mobile environments due to challenges in device testing, debugging, and configuration validation.
Minitap addresses this gap by enabling engineering teams to build and deploy mobile features in days instead of the traditional six-week cycle.
Minitap was founded by 23-year-olds Nicolas Dehandschoewercker and Luc Mahoux-Nakamura, who grew up together in Cosne-Cours-sur-Loire, France.
The duo has collaborated for seven years, combining deep experience in mobile development, AI research, and large-scale infrastructure. Their early projects included bootstrapping a mobile app called Fuego to 10,000 users.
Nicolas later studied Biomedical Engineering and AI at Imperial College London, while Luc built drone delivery infrastructure at Rakuten. This blend of technical skills positioned them to create a solution that bridges the gap between AI systems and mobile development environments.
The technical advancement behind Minitap lies in two core innovations:
- mobile-use: an open-source framework enabling AI agents to control smartphones in a human-like manner.
- minitap cloud: scalable infrastructure that deploys any iOS or Android configuration across thousands of devices in parallel.
These systems work together with AI coding environments to write mobile code, run tests on real devices, detect and fix bugs, and autonomously ship functional features.
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Within 40 days of development, Minitap ranked #1 on Google DeepMind’s AndroidWorld benchmark. The team later open-sourced the solution, amassing over 1,900 GitHub stars.
Strong Backing From Unicorn Founders and AI Experts
The seed round attracted a lineup of prominent investors, including unicorn founders and AI infrastructure leaders:
- Thomas Wolf (Hugging Face)
- Stefan Glanzer & Michael Breidenbrucker (Last.fm)
- Paul Muller (Adjust)
- Petter Made (SumUp)
- Daniel Krauss, Jochen Engert & André Schwämmlein (FlixBus)
- Saturnin Pugnet (Worldcoin)
Additional participation came from operators associated with OpenAI, DeepMind, LangChain, and LlamaIndex.
Katie Jacobs Stanton, Founder and General Partner at Moxxie Ventures, highlighted the founders’ execution speed and unique capabilities, stating that two young innovators surpassing Google within 40 days demonstrated “something rare.”
Future Vision: Autonomous Mobile Apps Optimized by AI
Today, mobile engineering teams use Minitap to build features ten times faster. The platform is also working toward enabling product teams to deploy new features directly: a product manager inputs a feature description and design, and AI generates code, tests it, and prepares A/B experiments within hours.
In the long term, Minitap plans to develop fully autonomous mobile applications capable of running experiments, analyzing usage data, proposing hypotheses, generating design variations, and iterating without human oversight.
Mercuri Partner Esha Vatsa noted that Minitap is among the first companies to apply agentic AI to mobile use cases through a full-stack approach – an area with significant opportunity and complexity.
