Atlanta-based mobile testing startup MoQuality has closed a $2.5 million seed round led by San Francisco-based Amity Ventures and Cox Enterprises with participation from Newton Fund, Service Provider Capital and additional angel investors. They’ll now be expanding their engineering team to continue product development.
MoQuality’s AI-powered test-automation tool, called Barista (a play on words related to the many coffee-inspired developer tools like the programming language Java and Android testing framework Espresso), lets developers quickly run tests on real mobile devices without having to write any test scripts.
Eliminating script writing allows developers to release apps faster and with less bugs, says MoQuality co-founder and CEO Shauvik Roy Choudhary.
“In the last decade, we’ve witnessed transformation from manual to automated testing frameworks. We are now excited to introduce AI to the world of testing,” says Roy Choudhary.
“Mobile app developers love to code to build their product. But they don’t like coding again to test their code. Sometimes testing gets ignored,” he says. He notes this is particularly common with small to mid-sized businesses, who may not have the financial resources to bring testing in-house or hire a contractor at a high price.
Roy Choudhary and his co-founder and CTO Pushkar Kolhe are both Georgia Tech PhD’s with experience in software testing, AI and machine learning. The company was founded in 2015 and initially funded with a National Science Foundation Small Business Innovation Research grant. Then, Moquality was accepted into the 2017 class of the Techstars Atlanta accelerator program, presented by Cox Enterprises.
The tool is applicable for anyone from small development shops to large enterprises, says Roy Choudhary. They offer a limited version of the software to individual developers for free with a premium version starting at $100 per month. Enterprises receive customized plans where the MoQuality team actually performs the testing for them, through their software.
“Enterprise companies are still used to doing it the manual way, where they have a huge spreadsheet and they hire a contractor to go through that spreadsheet and run through tests manually on a number of devices,” explains Roy Choudhary. “So for us, we are trying to fit into that process. They give us that spreadsheet, we run it through our own software, through all of those test cases.” The result is the same standard of testing at a fraction of the price.
Previous and current customers include mobile device manufacturer Huawei, Cox Enterprises, ParkMobile, and CareerBuilder.
Following Techstars, MoQuality was also accepted into the Atlanta-based Coca-Cola BridgeCommunity startup commercialization program. Beyond exposure to the partner corporates Coca-Cola, Mailchimp, Cox Enterprises, Caggemini, Porsche, and SunTrust, the program introduced MoQuality to the investors that would eventually sign on to lead their seed round.
“They [Amity Ventures] were really open to us building the company here in Atlanta,” says Roy Choudhary. “We closed with them within a month.”
MoQuality currently employs 10 and will be growing in engineering, marketing and sales. They will be presenting at the Venture Atlanta conference later this month.
