Minitap’s young founders topped Google DeepMind’s AndroidWorld benchmark and raised a seed round to build an AI tool that gives agents control of real mobile apps.
an AI system that outperforms Google DeepMind on its own mobile agent benchmark. They raised a seed round on the strength of that result, and now run a small engineering team between Paris and San Francisco.
Founders, Nicolas Dehandschoewercker and his longtime collaborator Luc Mahoux-Nakamura, have been building apps together since high school. Their claim is simple. They say their agent can operate a mobile device more reliably than systems produced by some of the largest AI labs.AndroidWorld, a benchmark maintained by Google DeepMind, evaluates how well an agent can use a phone across everyday apps. Tasks include scrolling, typing, navigation and functionally complete flows such as booking a ride or sending an email. The benchmark is public. Anyone can download it, wire up an agent and publish results. Dehandschoewercker has posted Minitap’s runs and says the open source version of their framework, called mobile-use, spent the summer near the top of the community leaderboard. No one has to take his word for it. The tests are reproducible, and the code is available under an open license with roughly nineteen hundred stars on GitHub. This result, and the small team that produced it, is why investors co-led by Moxxie Ventures and Mercuri, with participation from EWOR, Tekton Ventures, Amigos Venture Capital, and six unicorn founders funded the company only a few months after it formed. The £4.1m seed round closed in October.. Minitap’s headcount remains small. Most of its engineers are in Paris. The founders work between California and France, flying teams back and forth as needed. When I spoke with Dehandschoewercker he was in Tokyo, where the group had gathered temporarily to work through deadlines.The benchmark is not the business, but it matters because of the problem Minitap is trying to solve. Mobile engineers still write Swift, Kotlin or React Native code without meaningful feedback from AI tools. Copilots can generate patches, but they cannot see the phone, understand layout problems or verify what they built. If something is off by a few pixels or an interaction fails, the engineer has to step in. Dehandschoewercker says that is why building consumer mobile apps still takes weeks even when AI produces some of the code.Minitap’s agent connects to a virtual phone in the cloud. It can see the screen, compare it to a Figma design, test interactions and report failures. This depends on the same capabilities measured by AndroidWorld. The user experience for developers is closer to web testing tools, where an agent can interact with the real page and validate outcomes. Dehandschoewercker wants mobile development to move at the same pace. The company is working with early design partners to refine pricing and deployment models. Several groups are working on agentic QA or device control, though they approach the problem from different parts of the pipeline. Momentic and Autosana focus on automated testing for QA teams. Their tools generate natural language test cases and maintain them as the app changes. AskUI has built a vision driven controller for desktop and mobile interfaces. These companies run agents against apps and browsers, but they do not position themselves as inner loop development tools. BrowserStack remains the main provider of large scale device clouds. It runs the phones and emulators that other companies build on, including teams experimenting with agent driven workflows. Dehandschoewercker previously built a consumer app while studying in London. The experience left him frustrated with how long mobile development takes. He says the conversion of ideas into real features is far slower on phones than on the web, and that Minitap only exists because he and his co founder wanted a faster internal workflow. The open source traction surprised him. The seed raise followed. And the public benchmark provided an objective way to show that the work was real.
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