- Robotics Process Automation for Development (RPAD) company Mesmer has raised $15 million in Series A funding
Mesmer — a Robotics Process Automation for Development (RPAD) company that launched from stealth mode today — announced it raised $15 million in Series A funding led by Intel Capital with participation from True Ventures.
What does Mesmer do? Mesmer uses AI-powered bots to offload customer experience testing from developers.
Customer experience testing requires verifying app quality from a user-centric perspective — which often involves UI, end-to-end, functional, integration, and visual testing. Enterprises going through digital transformations are building and expanding the capabilities of their mobile apps.
And there are two significant obstacles in the mobile development process. Testing mobile apps from a customer-centric perspective is still manual, time-intensive, costly and imprecise thus resulting in buggy apps with one-star ratings. And any attempt to automate this process requires hiring skilled software engineers, something this made difficult by the growing shortage of technical talent.
“Forty percent of a developer’s time is consumed by customer experience testing,” said Mesmer co-founder and CEO Waheed Qureshi. “It’s tedious, unpopular work with developers, who have to manually tap through screens on different devices looking for glitches. We’re using robotic process automation, or RPA, to compress a process that can literally take 10 days into 35 minutes, all the while improving the quality of the customer experience.”
Mesmer’s patent pending Deep Learning Automation (DLA) uses artificial intelligence, specifically computer vision, natural language processing, and path planning models to test apps in a customer-centric way. And Mesmer’s software functions much like a self-driving car: software robots crawl through every nook and cranny of apps recognizing objects on the road ahead like login buttons and credit card fields, constantly in search of any obstacles—or bugs. Mesmer’s solution covers the full-stack, with bots doing everything from building out testing infrastructure and performing UI testing to documenting bugs along with executing user acceptance testing (UAT).
“Customer experience testing is a universal pain point for developers, and Mesmer–without a marketing or sales team–has been able to demonstrate a clear ROI to a diverse and growing base of enterprise customers,” added Nick Washburn — senior managing director of Intel Capital. “Using artificial intelligence for this task is disruptive, and we look forward to working with the team to address this growing need in the industry.”
Mesmer plans to use the funding to aggressively market the $40 billion testing market’s first and only Robotic Process Automation for Development (RPAD).
“The value proposition to customers is pretty straightforward,” explained True Ventures partner Puneet Agarwal, a partner at True Ventures — which seeded Mesmer with $4 million in 2017. “Mesmer pairs software robots with software developers to make their time exponentially more productive.”
And Mesmer was founded by Zenprise team that built and sold its leading mobile device management solution to Citrix for $355 million in 2012.
