Minitap: French Founders Beat DeepMind Benchmark, Raise $4.1M for Faster Mobile Apps
Minitap: French Founders Beat DeepMind Benchmark, Raise $4.1M for Faster Mobile Apps
Two 23-year-olds from a small village in Burgundy, France, started Minitap, a San Francisco-based AI company. They topped Google DeepMind’s AndroidWorld benchmark for AI controlling mobile devices, beating teams from Google, ByteDance, Microsoft Research, and Alibaba. That result helped them raise $4.1 million in seed funding, as Forbes, The Manila Times, and Sahyadri Startups report (Tech Funding News cited $4.2 million).
The Problem Minitap Solves
Mobile app development lags behind web development. Even with AI tools like Cursor or Claude, mobile teams take six weeks for features that web teams ship in days. The issue? AI code generators can’t test on real phones, spot layout errors, or handle device variations.
Minitap’s platform fixes this. Its AI agents write code, run it on real or cloud-based devices, find bugs, fix them, and deploy. Teams already ship features 10x faster, per early users, according to Tech Funding News.
Key Tech Behind It
- mobile-use: Open-source framework for AI to control phones like humans—scroll, type, navigate apps. Hit 1,900 GitHub stars after launch.
- Minitap cloud: Spins up thousands of iOS/Android configs in parallel for testing.
These let AI handle the full loop: code to ship. Nicolas Dehandschoewercker, co-founder and CEO, said in multiple reports: “Mobile is 60% of internet usage but moves at 10% of web speed. Every consumer app company ships 5x more experiments on web than mobile.”
Founders’ Background
Nicolas Dehandschoewercker and Luc Mahoux-Nakamura grew up in Cosne-Cours-sur-Loire. Luc, a child prodigy, taught Nico coding. They ranked top 0.1% academically in France, built their first app at 18 (Fuego, 10k users), then split: Nico to Imperial College AI research, Luc to Rakuten drone infrastructure. They reunited to tackle mobile speed.
Four months after starting, they claimed the AndroidWorld #1 spot—in 40 days, per investors.
Funding Details and Why They Raised
Moxxie Ventures and Mercuri co-led the round. Others joined: EWOR, Tekton Ventures, Amigos Venture Capital, plus unicorn founders like Thomas Wolf (Hugging Face), Petter Made (SumUp), Paul Muller (Adjust), Stefan Glanzer and Michael Breidenbrucker (Last.fm), Daniel Krauss, Jochen Engert, and André Schwämmlein (FlixBus), Saturnin Pugnet (Worldcoin). Operators from OpenAI, DeepMind, LangChain, LlamaIndex too.
The money accelerates their platform. Katie Jacobs Stanton of Moxxie told Forbes: “When you see two 23-year-olds from rural France beat Google in 40 days, you recognize something rare.” Esha Vatsa of Mercuri added they take a full-stack approach to AI coding agents for mobile.
Luc Mahoux-Nakamura put it simply: “Every consumer mobile company needs to experiment faster. The companies that run 10x more experiments will win their markets.”
What’s Next
Short-term: Product managers describe features or upload Figma designs; AI builds, tests, and A/B tests same-day—no engineers needed.
Long-term: Self-optimizing apps that experiment and iterate alone. Small team now (Paris/SF split), working with early partners on pricing.
Sebastyen
Sebastyen Wolf is our Editor-in-Chief. He is an analyst and entrepreneur with experience working alongside early-stage founders, launching online ventures, and studying the data patterns that shape successful companies. A fan of Shark Tank since Season 1, he now focuses on translating the show’s most valuable insights into clear, practical takeaways for readers.
