AI Prodigies Beat Google, Vowing to Make Mobile Development 10x Faster

SAN FRANCISCO, CA – December 01, 2025 – In a move that sent ripples through the software development world, Minitap, an AI-powered mobile development platform, today announced a $4.1 million seed funding round. But the capital, co-led by Moxxie Ventures and Mercuri, isn't the most startling part of the story. The announcement comes just four months after its 23-year-old founders, Nicolas Dehandschoewercker and Luc Mahoux-Nakamura, achieved the #1 global ranking on the AndroidWorld benchmark, a complex testing ground for AI agents, outperforming powerhouse research teams from Google DeepMind, ByteDance, and Microsoft Research. Their mission is to tackle one of tech's most stubborn problems: the glacial pace of mobile app development.

While web developers have embraced AI assistants to shrink two-week projects into two-day sprints, the mobile world has been left behind. Minitap claims it has the key to close this gap, enabling engineering teams to ship features in days, not the typical six-week cycle. This isn't just about incremental improvement; it's a fundamental reimagining of how the apps on our phones are built and evolved.

The David vs. Goliath Benchmark

To understand the significance of Minitap's funding, one must first appreciate their technical coup. In just 40 days, the duo built and deployed an AI agent that conquered the AndroidWorld benchmark. This isn't a simple academic exercise; AndroidWorld, partly developed by Google DeepMind itself, is a dynamic environment designed to test an AI's ability to control and operate real-world Android apps using natural language commands. It features over a hundred tasks across 20 common applications, with millions of potential variations, making it a formidable challenge for any AI system.

For a nascent startup to not only compete but to beat the very creators of the benchmark and other billion-dollar research labs is an extraordinary validation of their approach. It demonstrates a deep, practical understanding of AI's application in a notoriously difficult environment. This feat caught the attention of investors who look for exactly this kind of disruptive potential.

"When you see two 23-year-olds from rural France beat Google in 40 days, you recognize something rare," commented 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."

Their success wasn't a closely guarded secret. True to the spirit of modern AI development, the founders open-sourced their core solution, a framework they call 'mobile-use'. The repository has already attracted nearly 2,000 stars on GitHub, signaling strong interest from the developer community and advancing the entire field of mobile AI agents.

Deconstructing the 'Mobile Bottleneck'

The core problem Minitap addresses is a persistent source of frustration for tech companies. "Mobile is 60% of internet usage but moves at 10% of web speed," said Nicolas Dehandschoewercker, co-founder and CEO of Minitap. He speaks from experience, noting the two years it took to build his first viral product. "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 bottleneck exists because AI coding assistants that excel in web development falter in the mobile ecosystem. They can't effectively test code on physical devices, iterate when bugs inevitably appear, or verify that a feature works across the staggering variety of phone models, screen sizes, and operating system versions.

Minitap’s solution is a full-stack approach that combines its open-source agent with a powerful cloud infrastructure. The 'mobile-use' framework allows an AI agent to control a phone like a human would—tapping, swiping, and inputting text. This is then connected to the 'minitap cloud,' a system that can instantly spin up thousands of parallel device configurations for both iOS and Android. This combination allows an AI to write mobile code, deploy it to a vast array of virtual devices for testing, identify bugs, autonomously correct its own code, and ultimately ship a working feature without the weeks of manual back-and-forth that plague engineering teams today.

From Burgundy to Silicon Valley's Big Bet

The story of Minitap is as compelling as its technology. Dehandschoewercker and Mahoux-Nakamura met in Cosne-Cours-sur-Loire, a small village in France's Burgundy region. Mahoux-Nakamura, described as a child prodigy, taught his friend to code, and together they pushed each other to rank in the top 0.1% of France's students. At 18, they bootstrapped their first mobile app, Fuego, to 10,000 users, gaining firsthand experience with the development pains they now aim to solve.

Their paths diverged but remained complementary. Dehandschoewercker studied Biomedical Engineering at Imperial College London, where he became obsessed with AI research after watching the documentary on DeepMind's AlphaGo. Meanwhile, Mahoux-Nakamura was at Rakuten, building the complex infrastructure for delivery drones. When they reunited, they possessed a rare and potent combination of skills: deep mobile development experience, cutting-edge AI research knowledge, and practical expertise in building scalable infrastructure. This trifecta is what investors believe makes them uniquely suited to solve this problem.

“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," said Daniel Dippold, Founder and CEO of EWOR, an early backer. "The combination of AI research capabilities, mobile development skills, and sheer hunger of will is unprecedented and ideal for solving this specific problem.”

The Autonomous Future of Apps

While Minitap is currently focused on empowering engineering teams, its vision extends far beyond. The next step is to democratize mobile development entirely, enabling non-technical teams to bring ideas to life. In this future, a product manager could simply describe a new feature, provide a Figma design, and have Minitap's AI generate the code, run the tests, and ship a ready-to-launch A/B test within an afternoon.

The ultimate goal is even more ambitious: creating mobile apps that optimize themselves. Minitap envisions a world where an application can autonomously run its own experiments, analyze user behavior, generate hypotheses for improvement, build feature variations, measure the results, and iterate—all without human intervention. This would transform apps from static pieces of software into living, evolving services that continuously adapt to user needs.

This long-term vision is what excites investors like Esha Vatsa, Partner at Mercuri. “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," she stated. For the founders and their high-profile backers—a list that includes founders from Hugging Face, SumUp, and FlixBus—this isn't just about building apps faster. It's about building the infrastructure for the next generation of intelligent, autonomous mobile experiences.