Minitap, the AI-powered mobile development platform, has raised $4.1 million in seed funding. The round was co-led by Moxxie Ventures and Mercuri, with additional participation from EWOR, Tekton Ventures, and Amigos Venture Capital.
Six unicorn founders also joined the round, including Thomas Wolf of Hugging Face ($4.5B valuation), Stefan Glanzer and Michael Breidenbrucker from Last.fm, Paul Muller of Adjust (which had a $1B+ exit), Petter Made from SumUp ($8B valuation), Daniel Krauss, Jochen Engert and André Schwämmlein of FlixBus ($3B valuation), and Saturnin Pugnet from Worldcoin. The investor group also includes operators from OpenAI, DeepMind, LangChain, and LlamaIndex.
Mobile development remains roughly ten times slower than web development, even with modern AI tools. Platforms like Cursor and Claude have transformed how web developers work, letting them ship features in two days that previously took two weeks. But these same tools fall short on mobile. They can't test on actual devices, iterate when something breaks, or verify that features work across different configurations.
Minitap addresses this gap directly. The company's platform enables engineering teams to build mobile features in days rather than the typical six weeks.
"We spent two years building our first viral mobile product, 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."
The new funding will support Minitap's core mission: making mobile development accessible to non-technical teams. The company's immediate goal is to let product managers describe a feature, provide a Figma design, and have AI generate code, test it, and ship an A/B test in a single afternoon.
The team is primarily focused on engineering and achieving product-market fit. Most of the capital will go toward building out the technical team and infrastructure, with some allocation for working closely with design partners. Sales and go-to-market efforts aren't the priority right now. In fact, the investor network is bringing in more qualified leads than the team can handle. The focus is on making early customers wildly successful before scaling.
Looking further ahead, Minitap plans to build mobile apps that optimize themselves without human intervention. The vision includes apps that run experiments, analyze user behavior, generate hypotheses, build variations, measure results, and iterate autonomously.
"Every consumer mobile company needs to experiment faster," said 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."
The company was founded in 2025 by two 23-year-olds with an unusual backstory. Nicolas Dehandschoewercker and Luc Mahoux-Nakamura met in Cosne-Cours-sur-Loire, a village in Burgundy, France. Nicolas had spent two years in military school; Luc was a child prodigy who taught Nicolas how to code. They studied together daily to rank in France's top 0.1% academically.
At 18, they created their first mobile app and bootstrapped Fuego to 10,000 users. Nicolas went on to study Biomedical Engineering at Imperial College London and conduct AI research, inspired by 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.
Minitap's technical approach 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 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 of building, Minitap claimed the top position on Google DeepMind's AndroidWorld benchmark, the industry standard for measuring AI control of mobile devices. They beat research teams from Google DeepMind, ByteDance, Microsoft Research, and Alibaba. The founders then open-sourced their entire solution, growing their repository to 1,900 GitHub stars.
The traction goes beyond benchmarks. Minitap's design partners, which are under NDA, include consumer mobile apps with over 70 million users. These companies can already generate entire screens autonomously. They pass in a Figma design or JIRA ticket and get back fully functional, tested features without human input. That capability simply didn't exist in mobile development until now. The 1,900 GitHub stars translate to hundreds of developers experimenting with Mobile-Use every week, providing constant product feedback.
"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."
The combination of technical achievement and market timing has attracted strong investor interest. The problem is specific and measurable: mobile development is slow, and existing AI tools don't help.
Beyond capital, the lead investors bring strategic value. Moxxie and Mercuri have deep networks within Minitap's target market of consumer mobile-first companies. Moxxie opens doors to US consumer apps while Mercuri connects the team to European players. The founders are actively leveraging these networks for their first design partners. Several customer company founders actually became angels in the round after seeing what Minitap was building. That kind of conviction from operators who understand the problem firsthand speaks volumes.
"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 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.
