Minitap, an AI-powered platform designed to accelerate mobile development dramatically, announced it has raised $4.1 million in seed funding, co-led by Moxxie Ventures and Mercuri, with participation from EWOR, Tekton Ventures, Amigos Venture Capital, and six unicorn founders. The funding arrives just four months after founders Nico and Luc, both 23, surpassed teams from Google DeepMind, ByteDance, Microsoft Research, and Alibaba to claim the top global position on AndroidWorld, the leading benchmark for AI-controlled mobile devices.
While AI tools like Cursor and Claude have reshaped web development workflows, mobile development continues to lag behind—often taking six weeks to build features that web teams now ship in two days. Minitap aims to close that gap through full-stack automation that lets AI code, test, debug, and ship mobile features autonomously.
The company says its platform makes mobile development 10x faster by enabling engineering teams to test code on real devices, validate features across operating systems and configurations, and iterate in real time. Early customers are already using Minitap to significantly accelerate experimentation cycles on consumer-facing mobile apps.
Nico and Luc grew up together in the rural French village of Cosne-Cours-sur-Loire. After spending years studying together and ranking among France’s top 0.1% academically, they launched their first mobile app at age 18 and later bootstrapped Fuego to 10,000 users. Their combined backgrounds span mobile development, AI research, infrastructure engineering at scale, biomedical engineering at Imperial College London, and delivery drone systems at Rakuten.
Minitap’s breakthrough is powered by two core technologies: mobile-use, an open-source framework that allows AI agents to control mobile devices like humans, and minitap cloud, an infrastructure that can spin up thousands of iOS or Android configurations instantly. These systems connect directly to AI coding environments, allowing AI agents to write mobile code, identify bugs, fix issues, and deploy working features on real devices.
Within 40 days of development, the company reached the #1 position on Google DeepMind’s AndroidWorld benchmark and open-sourced its entire solution, which has since grown to 1,900 GitHub stars. The seed round includes backing from founders and executives behind Hugging Face, SumUp, Adjust, Last.fm, FlixBus, and Worldcoin, along with operators from OpenAI, DeepMind, LangChain, and LlamaIndex.
Moxxie Ventures founder Katie Jacobs Stanton said the team’s early performance and speed were significant factors in the investment. Mercuri Partner Esha Vatsa noted that Minitap is among the first companies to bring agentic AI to mobile development, spanning infrastructure, testing, and code generation.
Minitap’s long-term vision is for mobile apps to optimize themselves autonomously. The team aims to build a future in which apps can run experiments, analyze user behavior, generate and test variations, and iterate without human intervention. For now, the company is accelerating the way engineering and product teams build features—enabling product managers to describe a feature, provide a Figma design, and have AI generate code, test it, and launch an A/B test in a single afternoon.
KEY QUOTES:
“We spent two years building our first viral mobile product, and I’m embarrassed by that timeline. Mobile is 60% of internet usage but moves at 10% of web speed. Every consumer app company ships more experiments on web than mobile. We built Minitap to close that gap for everyone.”
Nicolas Dehandschoewercker, Co-Founder and CEO, Minitap
“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.”
Luc Mahoux-Nakamura, Co-Founder, Minitap
“Nicolas is leading one of the fastest teams I’ve seen. The combination of AI research capabilities, mobile development skills, and sheer hunger of will is unprecedented and ideal for solving this specific problem.”
Daniel Dippold, Founder and CEO, EWOR
“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.”
Katie Jacobs Stanton, Founder and General Partner, Moxxie Ventures
“Minitap is one of the first companies bringing agentic AI to mobile use and possibly the very first taking a full-stack approach to enable 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.”
Esha Vatsa, Partner, Mercuri
