Minitap Secures $4.1M Funding to Accelerate Mobile Development with AI

AI-driven mobile development platform Minitap has announced a $4.1 million seed funding round. The investment 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 achievement follows a significant milestone for the startup’s founders—two 23-year-olds from rural France—who recently topped a global benchmark for AI-controlled mobile devices, surpassing teams from leading research labs like Google DeepMind.

From Rural France to Industry-Leading Innovation

Minitap’s founding team, Nicolas Dehandschoewercker and Luc Mahoux‑Nakamura, met in Cosne-Cours-sur-Loire, a small village in Burgundy. Despite different backgrounds—one attended military school while the other was a child prodigy—they connected through a shared passion for coding. Their early collaboration included building a mobile app at age 18 that attracted 10,000 users. Nico later studied Biomedical Engineering at Imperial College London and pursued AI research inspired by DeepMind, while Luc gained practical experience engineering delivery drone infrastructure. Their combined expertise in mobile development, scalable systems, and AI led to a unique vision no traditional research lab could replicate.

Solving a Critical Mobile Development Bottleneck

The current mobile app landscape is hampered by slow development cycles. While web developers use AI tools to ship features in days, mobile teams often face six-week delays. Mobile development remains roughly ten times slower than web development—a stark contrast in an era dominated by mobile usage. Minitap was created to bridge this gap.

Using a proprietary technology stack that combines an open-source framework with scalable device-cloud infrastructure, Minitap enables AI agents to control real mobile devices as human developers would. The platform automates writing mobile code, running tests, diagnosing issues, fixing bugs, and deploying releases—all with minimal human input.

Within its first 40 days, the startup reached the number one spot globally on the respected AndroidWorld benchmark for AI-controlled mobile devices, outperforming research teams from top AI labs including DeepMind, ByteDance, Microsoft Research, and Alibaba. After achieving this result, the founders open-sourced their entire solution, quickly growing their GitHub repository to nearly 1,900 stars and sharing a major advance with the developer community.

The Impact of the New Funding

The seed funding will accelerate Minitap’s product development and market adoption. Engineering teams at consumer mobile companies are already using the platform to build features up to ten times faster. It allows growth teams to launch experiments without traditional engineering cycles: a product manager describes a feature and provides a Figma design, and the AI writes, tests, and delivers a fully functional A/B test within hours.

Longer term, the team envisions a future where mobile apps evolve 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 represents a fundamental shift from a slow, developer-heavy process to a dynamic, AI-driven feedback loop.

Shaping the Future of AI-Powered Mobile Development

Minitap’s seed round highlights a broader shift in mobile software development. Historically, mobile apps have trailed behind the web in development speed and experimentation, limiting innovation and agility. By enabling AI agents to interact with real devices, write code, test features, and ship updates autonomously, Minitap could democratize mobile development. Smaller teams or even solo founders could launch and iterate apps rapidly, while larger product teams could run dozens of experiments monthly instead of just a few.

Beyond faster release cycles, this approach could transform how mobile products evolve—enabling apps that continuously adapt, improve, and personalize experiences based on real user behavior, without manual development overhead. For the wider tech ecosystem, it may herald a new era where mobile development matches the velocity, flexibility, and experimentation potential of modern web development.