With the advent of generative AI, AI applications are transforming and reshaping industries and changing the way people work, and software development is no exception.
Autify, a San Francisco and Tokyo-based startup, has built an autonomous AI agent for software quality assurance to help software engineers complete their code faster, streamline their workflow, and increase their productivity—in other words, they've built an AI QA engineer for software engineers.
The startup announced on Monday that it closed a $13 million Series B round and launched a beta version of Zenes, an AI agent for software quality assurance customized for customers in the U.S. The Series B funding brings its total funding to $30 million, of which $24 million came from equity financing and $6 million from debt financing.
Global Capital Partners and LG Technology Ventures co-led the funding round, along with existing investors World Innovation Lab (WiL), Salesforce Ventures, Archetype Venture and Uncorrelated Ventures.
In 2016, two former software engineers, Ryo Chikazawa (CEO) and Sam Yamashita, co-founded Autify after experiencing first-hand the pain points of software testing length. To solve this problem, Autify built a platform called Autify NoCode that can improve the efficiency of developers and QA teams, enhance the software quality engineering process, and ultimately save time and resources.
NoCode is targeted at users in Japan and South Korea who rely heavily on manual testing. Autify's newly released Zenes, currently in beta, is designed specifically for US-based customers.
According to the company, Zenes “analyzes product requirements documents to generate test cases, writes automated test code, and automatically maintains the test code.” The company claims that Zenes has significantly reduced test case creation time by 55%, making it a distinct feature in the market.
“Companies that have invested heavily in automation through writing code do not need to adapt to no-code.[low-code] “They can write code, so they're passionate about software quality assurance, but they still suffer from a lack of resources,” Chikazawa said, adding that companies hope generative AI will improve their job productivity. “With the release of Zenes, we'll be able to capture an even earlier stage of software quality assurance – designing and creating test cases – and provide a comprehensive end-to-end solution across the entire QA process.”
Here's how Zene works: Users can upload product requirement documents in various formats such as .html, .pdf, .docx, .md, etc. An agent then generates a set of test cases that cover the product specifications. Users can edit these test cases to improve accuracy for next steps. Once edits are complete, Zenes generates automated test code.
“We believe that AI is not there to replace humans. It is there to enhance human capabilities and enable them to be more creative. The software development process and its quality assurance will be redefined by generative AI,” Chikazawa said.
The startup plans to use the new funding to implement AI capabilities to help customers with software quality assurance, Chikazawa told TechCrunch. Additionally, the startup plans to partner with LG CNS, the IT services division of LG, to expand into South Korea, in addition to its primary markets of the U.S. and Japan.
Autify did not disclose the number of customers but said it now serves 16 countries, up from two in 2021 when it raised its Series A. Autify's B2C and B2B clients include DeNA, NEC, NTT Smart Communications, Yahoo and ZoZo. The company's employee base has also more than tripled from 30 to 100 in 2021.