Minitap Raises $4.1M to Make Mobile Development 10× Faster with AI

Today, Minitap, the AI-powered mobile development platform, announced that it has secured $4.1 million in seed funding. The round was co-led by Moxxie Ventures and Mercuri, with participation from EWOR, Tekton Ventures, Amigos Venture Capital, and a group of six unicorn founders. This milestone arrives just months after the startup’s founders — two 23-year-olds from rural France — achieved a major breakthrough on the global benchmark for AI-controlled mobile devices, surpassing teams from leading research labs including Google DeepMind.

From Rural France to Industry Benchmark-Topping Innovation

The founding team of Minitap, Nicolas Dehandschoewercker and Luc Mahoux‑Nakamura, met in Cosne-Cours-sur-Loire, a small village in Burgundy, France. Despite coming from humble beginnings — with one having attended military school and the other a child prodigy — the two bonded over a shared passion for coding and spent their formative years studying intensely together. Their early experiments included building a mobile app at age 18 that garnered 10,000 users. Nico pursued Biomedical Engineering at Imperial College London and AI research inspired by DeepMind’s work, while Luc gained hands-on engineering experience building delivery drone infrastructure. Over time, their paths converged into a shared ambition: to fuse mobile-development expertise, scalable infrastructure know-how, and the power of AI — something that no conventional research lab could match.

Addressing a Major Bottleneck in Mobile Development

Today’s mobile-app landscape remains constrained by slow development cycles. While web developers can leverage AI tools to ship features in days, mobile teams often endure six-week development cycles. Mobile development remains roughly 10× slower than web — a paradox in an age where mobile usage dominates internet consumption. Minitap was born to close that gap.

Using a proprietary stack combining an open-source framework and a scalable device-cloud infrastructure, Minitap enables AI agents to control real mobile devices as if human developers had coded and tested them. Their platform automates writing mobile code, running tests, diagnosing issues, fixing bugs, and deploying functional releases — all with minimal human overhead.

Within their first 40 days, the startup climbed to #1 globally on the widely respected AndroidWorld benchmark for AI-controlled mobile devices, outperforming research teams from top AI labs like DeepMind, ByteDance, Microsoft Research, and Alibaba. After hitting that benchmark, the founders open-sourced their entire solution, rapidly growing their repository to nearly 1,900 stars on GitHub, and sharing a major leap forward with the developer community.

What the Funding Means for Minitap

With this injection of capital, Minitap plans to accelerate both product development and adoption. Engineering teams at consumer-mobile companies are already using Minitap to build features up to 10× faster. The platform empowers growth teams to launch experiments without requiring traditional engineering cycles: a product manager describes a feature and provides a Figma design, the AI writes and tests the code, and within hours delivers a fully functioning A/B test.

Over the longer term, the team envisions a future where mobile apps evolve themselves autonomously. Minitap aims to build infrastructure that can run experiments, analyze user behavior, generate hypotheses, build and deploy variations, measure results, and iterate — all without human intervention. This ambition reflects a deeper transformation: shifting mobile development from a slow, developer-intensive process to a dynamic, AI-driven feedback loop.

Building the Future of Mobile Development with AI

Minitap’s seed raise signals a broader shift in how mobile software might be developed going forward. Historically, mobile apps have lagged behind web in development speed and experimentation frequency, limiting innovation and agility. By enabling AI agents to interact with real devices, write code, test features, and ship updates autonomously, Minitap has the potential to democratize mobile development. Smaller teams — even solo founders — could launch mobile apps that iterate crazily fast. Large product teams could run dozens of experiments per month instead of just a handful.

Beyond speeding up release cycles, this shift could reshape how mobile products evolve: apps that continuously adapt, improve, and personalize experiences in response to real user behavior — without manual dev cycles. For the broader tech ecosystem, that may mean a new era where mobile development starts to resemble modern web development in velocity, flexibility, and experimentation potential.