Arato announced that it has raised a $10 million seed round. The round was led by TLV Partners. Jibe Ventures also participated in the financing. Additional backers included a16z’s Raghu Raghuram, the former CEO of VMware, and Marianna Tessel, the former CTO of Intuit.
Arato is building technology for quality assurance in the AI era. The company is focused on helping businesses understand how their AI systems behave, where they fail, and what risks those failures create.
Traditional software testing has usually centered on whether software works as expected. But AI systems are probabilistic, meaning they can produce different outcomes and may fail in specific situations that are difficult to detect through manual testing or logs alone.
Arato addresses this challenge by learning how a company’s AI behaves. The platform then generates tens of thousands of simulated user interactions across text, voice, and images.
These simulations run through the real user interface and do not require access to the underlying code. This enables Arato to identify failure patterns before they are encountered by real customers.
The platform is designed to help companies assess not only whether an AI system works, but how often it fails, where it fails, and what the likely impact could be. This approach reflects the growing need for more advanced testing infrastructure as companies deploy AI agents and AI-powered products into production.
Arato was founded by Shahar Erez, Hilik Paz, and Tal Salmona. The founders previously built Stoke, which was acquired by Fiverr in 2021.
The team also spent two decades together working on software testing at Mercury Interactive and VMware. With Arato, they are applying that background to the emerging market for AI reliability, testing, and quality assurance.
