With the arrival of generative AI, AI applications are transforming and reshaping various industries and changing how people work. Software development isn’t any exception.
San Francisco- and Tokyo-based startup Autify has built an autonomous AI agent for software quality assurance to assist software engineers complete code quickly, streamline workflows and increase productivity. In other words, it’s built an AI QA engineer for software engineers.
The startup announced Monday that it had closed a $13 million Series B round and rolled out its beta version of Zenes, an AI agent for software quality assurance tailored for patrons within the U.S. The Series B funding brings its total raised to $30 million, which consists of $24 million in equity and $6 million in debt financing.
Global Capital Partners and LG Technology Ventures co-led the newest round, together with existing backers World Innovation Lab (WiL), Salesforce Ventures, Archetype Enterprise and Uncorrelated Ventures.
In 2016, two former software engineers, Ryo Chikazawa (CEO) and Sam Yamashita, co-founded Autify after they experienced firsthand the pain point of software testing lengths. To handle this issue, Autify has built a platform called Autify NoCode, which enables developers and QA teams to enhance efficiency and enhance the software quality engineering process, ultimately saving time and resources.
NoCode caters to users in Japan and South Korea who heavily depend on manual testing. Currently in beta, Autify’s newly launched Zenes is specifically designed for U.S.-based customers.
Zenes “generates test cases by analyzing product requirement documents, writes automated test codes and maintains the test codes routinely,” in response to the corporate. The corporate claims that Zenes significantly reduces the time to create test cases by 55%, a feature that sets it apart available in the market.
“Firms which have been heavily investing in automation by writing code don’t have to adapt to no-code/[low-code] because they’ll code. Nevertheless, they’re still affected by the shortage of resources,” Chikazawa said, adding that the businesses expect generative AI to make their work more productive. “With the launch of Zenes, now we will capture an excellent earlier stage of software quality assurance which is designing and creating test cases and we are going to have the option to offer a comprehensive end-to-end solution for the complete QA process.”
That is how Zene works: Users can upload their product requirement documents in various formats, including .html, .pdf, .docx, and .md. The agent then generates a set of outlined test cases covering the product specs. Users can edit these test cases with a purpose to improve the accuracy of the next steps. After any edits have been made, Zenes generates automated test codes.
“We imagine that AI isn’t here to switch humans. It’s here to boost human capability in order that we might be more creative. The software development process and its quality assurance might be redefined with generative AI,” Chikazawa said.
The startup will use the brand new capital to implement more AI capabilities to support customers’ software QA, Chikazawa told TechCrunch. As well as, the startup has partnered with LG CNS, an IT service unit of LG Corp, to expand into the Korean market, together with its core markets, the U.S. and Japan.
Autify didn’t disclose the number of shoppers but said it offers its services in 16 countries now, up from two countries in 2021, when it raised its Series A. Autify has B2C and B2B customers, including DeNA, NEC, NTT Smart Communication, Yahoo and ZoZo. Its staff has also greater than tripled from 30 in 2021 to 100.
