Mesmer Launches with $15 Million Series a to Use Software Robots to Offload the Manual Parts of Mobile Software Development

Founded by the Team from Zenprise, Mesmer Is the Only RPA Company Focused on the Development Organization, Freeing up 40% of the Developer’s Time by Automatically Testing Apps from a Customer’s Perspective

Mesmer launched from stealth mode and announced a $15 million Series A round led by Intel Capital, with participation from True Ventures. The company’s SaaS offering uses AI-powered bots to offload customer experience testing from developers. Customer experience testing requires verifying app quality from a user-centric perspective, often involving UI, end-to-end, functional, integration, and visual testing.

Enterprises undergoing digital transformation are building and expanding the capabilities of their mobile apps. There are two significant obstacles in the mobile development process. First, testing mobile apps from a customer-centric perspective is still manual, time-intensive, costly and imprecise. The results are buggy apps with one-star ratings—and disappointed, frustrated customers. And second, any attempt to automate this process requires hiring skilled software engineers, something made difficult by the growing shortage of technical talent. The US Department of Labor forecasts 1.4 million computer science related job openings in 2020, but only 400,000 CS graduates.

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“Forty percent of a developer’s time is consumed by customer experience testing,” said Mesmer Co-Founder and CEO Waheed Qureshi. “It’s tedious, unpopular work with developers, who have to manually tap through screens on different devices looking for glitches. We’re using robotic process automation, or RPA, to compress a process that can literally take 10 days into 35 minutes, all the while improving the quality of the customer experience.”

The company’s patent pending Deep Learning Automation™ (DLA) uses artificial intelligence, specifically computer vision, natural language processing, and path planning models to test apps in a customer-centric way. Mesmer’s software functions much like a self-driving car: software robots crawl through every nook and cranny of apps recognizing objects on the road ahead, such as login buttons and credit card fields, constantly in search of any obstacles or bugs. The solution covers the full-stack, with bots doing everything from building out testing infrastructure and performing UI testing to documenting bugs and executing user acceptance testing, or UAT.

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“Customer experience testing is a universal pain point for developers, and Mesmer–without a marketing or sales team–has been able to demonstrate a clear ROI to a diverse and growing base of enterprise customers,” said Nick Washburn, senior managing director of Intel Capital. “Using artificial intelligence for this task is disruptive, and we look forward to working with the team to address this growing need in the industry.”

Mesmer is founded by the Zenprise team that built and sold its leading mobile device management solution to Citrix for $355 million in 2012. Mesmer will use the funding to aggressively market the $40 billion testing market’s first and only Robotic Process Automation for Development (RPAD).

“The value proposition to customers is pretty straightforward,” said Puneet Agarwal, a partner at True Ventures, which seeded Mesmer with $4 million in 2017. “Mesmer pairs software robots with software developers to make their time exponentially more productive.”

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