Two 23-year-olds from rural France beat Google DeepMind on industry benchmark within 40 days, backed by six unicorn founders including Hugging Face and SumUp
Minitap, the AI-powered mobile development platform, 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 round comes just four months after Minitap founders achieved the #1 position globally on AndroidWorld, the industry benchmark for AI-controlled mobile devices, surpassing research teams from Google DeepMind, ByteDance, Microsoft Research, and Alibaba.
Mobile development is 10x slower than web development, even in the age of AI. While tools like Cursor and Claude enable web developers to ship features in 2 days that previously took 2 weeks, those same AI tools remain largely ineffective for mobile—unable to test on devices, iterate when things break, or verify features work across configurations. Minitap solves this bottleneck, enabling engineering teams to build mobile features in days, instead of the usual six weeks.
“We spent two years building our first viral mobile product, today, and I’m embarrassed by that timeline,” said Nicolas Dehandschoewercker, co-founder and CEO of Minitap. “Mobile is 60% of internet usage but moves at 10% of web speed. Every consumer app company (Duolingo, Calm, Hinge etc) ships 5x more experiments on web than mobile. We built Minitap to close that gap for everyone.”
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“Every consumer mobile company needs to experiment faster,” added Luc Mahoux-Nakamura, co-founder at Minitap. “The companies that run 10x more experiments will win their markets. We’re building the infrastructure that makes that speed possible.”
Nico and Luc met in Cosne-Cours-sur-Loire, a village in Burgundy, France. Nico had spent two years in military school; Luc was a child prodigy. Luc taught Nico how to code, and they studied together every day to rank in France’s top 0.1% academically. Seven years later, they’ve built every project side by side.
At 18, they created their first mobile app and bootstrapped Fuego to 10,000 users. Nico went on to study Biomedical Engineering at Imperial College London and carry out AI research, obsessed with DeepMind’s AlphaGo documentary. Luc built delivery drone infrastructure at Rakuten. Together, they combined mobile development experience, AI research expertise, and infrastructure built at scale, a combination no research lab could match.
“Nicolas is leading one of the fastest teams I’ve seen. It comes from years of working together, knowing mobile inside out, and understanding how to build AI systems that hold up. The combination of AI research capabilities, mobile development skills, and sheer hunger of will is unprecedented and ideal for solving this specific problem,” said Daniel Dippold, Founder and CEO of EWOR.
Minitap’s technical achievement centers on two innovations: mobile-use, an open-source framework that lets AI agents control phones like humans, and minitap cloud, infrastructure that instantly spins up any phone configuration – iOS or Android – across thousands of devices in parallel. These tools connect to AI coding environments, enabling AI to write mobile code, test it on real devices, identify bugs, fix itself, and ship working features autonomously.
Within their first 40 days, Minitap claimed the #1 position on Google DeepMind’s AndroidWorld benchmark, the industry standard for measuring AI control of mobile devices. The founders then open-sourced their entire solution, advancing the field and growing their repository to 1,900 GitHub stars.
The funding round attracted a high concentration of unicorn founders and AI infrastructure experts: Thomas Wolf (Hugging Face, $4.5B valuation), Stefan Glanzer & Michael Breidenbrucker (Last.fm), Paul Muller (Adjust, >$1B exit), Petter Made (SumUp, $8B valuation), Daniel Krauss, Jochen Engert & André Schwämmlein (FlixBus, $3B valuation) and Saturnin Pugnet (Worldcoin). The round also includes operators from OpenAI, DeepMind, LangChain, and LlamaIndex.
“When you see two 23-year-olds from rural France beat Google in 40 days, you recognize something rare,” said Katie Jacobs Stanton, Founder and General Partner at Moxxie Ventures. “Nico and Luc are solving a massive problem that they uniquely understand and are moving at an urgent speed.”
Today, engineering teams at consumer mobile companies use Minitap to build features 10x faster. Minitap aims to enable growth teams to ship features without going through the engineering. A product manager describes a feature, provides a Figma design, and AI generates code, tests it, and ships an A/B test in one afternoon.
Longer term, the team plans to build mobile apps that optimize themselves autonomously, running experiments, analyzing user behavior, generating hypotheses, building variations, measuring results, and iterating—all without human intervention.
“minitap is one of the first companies that is bringing agentic AI to mobile use and possibly the very first that is taking a full stack approach to enable the use of 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” said Esha Vatsa, Partner at Mercuri.
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