Autify Raises $13 Million in Series B Funding and Launches Zenes, an Autonomous AI Agent for Software Quality Assurance

Blog
June 17, 2024

San Francisco and Tokyo, June 17, 2024—Autify, an AI platform for quality engineering, today announced that it has completed a Series B funding round of $13 million and released a beta version of Zenes, an autonomous AI agent for software quality assurance.

Leading the round are Globis Capital Partners, a leading venture capital fund based in Tokyo, Japan, and LG Technology Ventures, the Silicon Valley-based venture capital arm of LG Group, which focuses on AI, enterprise software, and energy transformation. Autify, leveraging the recent round of funding plans to expand into the Korean market and strengthen its collaboration with LG CNS, making Korea a key market of focus alongside existing core markets such as the US and Japan.

Existing investors WiL (World Innovation Lab), Salesforce Ventures, Archetype Ventures, and Uncorrelated Ventures also participated in the round.

Autify is a platform that supercharges developer and QA teams and optimizes the software quality engineering process. The company aims to enhance people’s creativity through AI and technology. Since its inception in 2016, the company has gained a number of global enterprise customers in the B2C and B2B verticals, including DeNA, NEC, NTT Smart Connect, Yahoo, ZOZO, and Q4.

With this recent round of funding, Autify plans to expand its capabilities to support code-based test automation and build a comprehensive Generative AI-powered quality engineering platform featuring its newest product, Zenes.

Supercharging Quality Engineering with Zenes

Zenes is an autonomous AI agent for software quality assurance — in effect, an AI QA engineer working for you. It generates test cases by analyzing product requirement documents, writes automated test codes, and maintains the test codes automatically.

Autify has applied Zenes to its own QA process, successfully reducing the time spent creating test cases by 55%.

How it works:

After users upload their product requirement document in any file format (.html, .pdf, .docx, .md, etc.), Zenes will generate a group of outlined test cases covering the product specs. Users can then edit these test cases to increase the accuracy of subsequent steps.

After any edits have been made Zenes then generates automated test codes, e.g. the test case steps in Gherkin format. Users can use generative AI-powered code completion within the product to edit this Gherkin output.

Please check out the full demo here.

“AI is poised to drastically improve productivity in the software development process, “ said Ryo Chikazawa, Autify’s co-founder & CEO. “We believe that AI is not here to replace humans. It’s here to enhance human capability so that we can be more creative. The software development process and its quality assurance will be redefined with Generative AI, and we are thrilled to redesign this process with our AI-powered product suite.”

Users can take a closer look at Zenes and join the waitlist for access here:
https://zenes.ai/

■Comments from Investors

Satoshi Fukushima, Partner of Globis Capital Partner

Development agility has become a prerequisite for all companies' evolution. Autify's product not only automates testing but also commits to improving the overall development process, simultaneously achieving both quality enhancement and acceleration of outputs, and we believe this contributes significantly to productivity improvement worldwide. As a platform, Autify liberates development resources, including engineers, to focus on "true work," and it goes beyond "business efficiency" to achieve "value addition." We expect Autify to work as a partner in accelerating the progress of global companies and as such, GCP is firmly committed to supporting Autify's journey onwards.

Mayu Kudo, Associate of Globis Capital Partner

We are delighted to be a lead investor in this Series B funding round. With the increasing need for agile development and quick product releases, software test automation is rapidly becoming an irreversible global trend. We believe Ryo and his team, with their exceptional product development capabilities and deep insights into the global market, can boost productivity in development organizations across Japan and worldwide. We are fully committed to supporting Autify's ambitious global challenge.

VP Mr. Min Bae, Head of Security & Solution Business Division

With this investment, we will work with Autify to strengthen LG CNS' system verification solution lineup.  We are committed to helping our customers quickly and error-free adopt new systems to innovate their business value.

Mr.Taejoon Park Managing Director, LG tech ventures

What sets Autify apart is its emphasis on AI, no-code, and customer success. Autify has already demonstrated the strong value its AI-powered no-code solution brings to a wide range of existing customers and is well-positioned to grow further as demand for software testing becomes even more challenging.

Shumpei Fukui, Managing Partner of Archetype Ventures

It has been over a decade since it was said that software would swallow the world - this trend has become reality, and with the addition of AI, the trend is accelerating. Under these circumstances, the fundamental competitiveness of software has shifted to quality, and even beyond that, quality is now a given. In a development environment that is evolving at an astonishing pace, there is a very strong need for QA to evolve to ensure quality. We are pleased to announce our third investment in Autify, a company that has consistently evolved to meet those needs, and to join them on their journey to create impact at a global scale.

Ken Asada, Partner & Head of Japan Salesforce Ventures

As the development of generative AI technology is expected to make a big wave in the field of software development and testing, a big change is also expected in the field of software testing. We believe that Autify’s products and team, which we have worked with since the seed stage, have the potential to become a global leader in fully utilizing AI technology in software testing, and we have made this third investment in the company. We are very excited to continue our support of Autify with the new investors.

Salil Deshpande, General partner of Uncorrelated Ventures

To produce high quality software, developers must write thousands of tests, so many that the tests themselves become a white elephant, and automating and managing these tests defines the career of many engineers. Autify's AI-based test automation finally addresses problems in software test automation that companies have struggled with for years.

Andy Cohen, Partner of WiL

WiL is pleased to announce continued support for Autify as part of their Series B financing. WiL believes there is a large, global need for software testing, and companies need easy to use software as well as software enabled professional services. Autify has proven the popularity of its offerings in Japan and is now expanding globally in the US and in Korea. WiL believes Autify has the right product suite for the global market, and with this new financing will be able to ramp up go-to-market efforts to bring its solution to many more companies in Japan, the US and Korea.

Mr.Hiroki Uchida, Senior Associate at Shoko Chukin Bank, Tokyo Branch

Improving agility in software development is one of the key challenges. We recognize Autify's solution as a critical product that contributes to speeding up the development process through automated software testing. We are committed to fostering innovation by supporting startup companies in various ways, and we are very pleased to be able to assist in their growth strategy financially this time. We look forward to the continued expansion of their business domain and further development in the future.

About Autify

With a mission to enhance people’s creativity through technology, Autify, Inc. has developed an AI-powered quality engineering platform. Since its launch, Autify has been implemented by many global organizations whose development teams use Autify to automate their software testing. Test automation often presents several challenges, such as a lack of resources or the time required to create test cases, maintain end-to-end (E2E) test code, and debug tests. Autify’s product suite addresses these issues utilizing generative AI. Learn more at https://autify.com/

Media Contact:
Kaori Shimizu
Email: press@autify.com