Mobot Launches the First Robot-Powered QA-as-a-Service Testing Platform for Mobile Apps with $12.5 Million

Mobot publicly launched its QA-as-a-service platform and announced $12.5 million in Series A funding from Cota Capital, with participation from Heavybit, Uncorrelated Ventures, and others.

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“Robots do these jobs faster, more accurately, and can easily handle the fragmentation of software across devices and ecosystems. We’re building the infrastructure that helps modern companies adapt to our device-dependent world.”

Mobot’s first-of-its-kind platform uses physical robots to battle test mobile applications. Companies serving millions of users, including Citizen, Persona, Branch, Mapbox, and Radar, use Mobot to test apps on hundreds of devices, platforms, and operating systems within hours.

“Mobot has helped us increase our App Store rating from 4.2 to 4.8 and achieve a 99.9% crash-free rate,” said Swamy Ramaswamy, CTO and COO at Sandboxx. “Our app is responsible for helping military service members send and receive physical letters with family, so stability is crucial. Mobot is a critical part of our QA workflow and regularly uncovers issues that weren’t surfaced by our internal software testing process.”

Mobile users today interact with numerous physical devices, notifications, integrations, operating systems, and thousands of other points outside developer control. Emulators and other virtual QA environments are unable to test the formidable number of edge cases that cause breakdowns in performance and functionality. The $40 billion software testing market leverages low-cost labor to fill in the gaps, but at a high cost and with variable testing accuracy.

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Mobot solves this problem with the only QA-as-a-service platform that uses state-of-the-art mechanical robots to automate testing of repetitive, human-like functions in a real-world setting. This approach eliminates thousands of hours of manual testing, increases testing efficiency exponentially, and captures more bugs in-app before app store launches than software can do alone.

“The limitations of QA software mean too many people hours are burned testing mobile apps to make sure they ship right the first time. Mobot’s non-obvious insight to use physical robots for manual testing is an ingenious solution,” said Adit Singh, partner at Cota Capital. “Its fleet of robots are more reliable and do the job with accuracy and consistency. Mobot helps eliminate tedious, manual testing so customers can ship their mobile apps with confidence, every time.”

“Real-world quality testing is critical to building mobile applications that people love and to making digital transformation initiatives successful. Unfortunately, real-world testing is also an expensive and repetitive task that humans don’t like and can be pretty bad at,” said Jesse Robbins, partner at Heavybit. “Mobot gives quality people at every software company a powerful team of helpful robots to do world-class testing at scale, across devices and ecosystems, in a matter of hours.”

Challenging use cases that Mobot is able to automate tests for include:

• Complex hardware and software interaction, such as multi-device interactions for instant messaging and ride hailing or Bluetooth/WiFi-enabled hardware connections.
• Streaming data stability, particularly push notifications which are increasing in complexity and dependencies, such as Apple’s new Live Activities feature for iOS 16.
• Backwards compatibility testing, like memory leaks triggered by third-party software on older iOS devices and camera testing across Android versions and manufacturers.
• Critical action stability, such as revenue-generating activities like in-app purchases, subscription management, Apple/Google Pay, and payments API integration; user login, new account creation and multi-factor authentication (including SMS and biometrics); and app behavior when backgrounded or interrupted by a phone call.

Mobot founder and CEO Eden Full Goh has over a decade of experience in engineering and product. Her career began when she dropped out of Princeton to build SunSaluter, a low-cost solar panel rotator used in developing countries around the world, with an entrepreneurship fellowship from The Thiel Foundation. Years later as a product manager for a critical medical device used in hospitals, she was baffled by how many hours her team spent manually testing the software on mobile devices. She started Mobot to address what she saw as a huge gap no one was talking about.

“Software is increasingly physical, and that means testing in a vacuum doesn’t cut it anymore. But using humans to do real-world regression testing is a poor use of their creativity and potential,” said Eden Full Goh, founder and CEO at Mobot. “Robots do these jobs faster, more accurately, and can easily handle the fragmentation of software across devices and ecosystems. We’re building the infrastructure that helps modern companies adapt to our device-dependent world.”

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