Klarent (formerly fore ai), a Zurich-based autonomous software testing startup, has closed a €7.13 million Seed funding round.
The round was led by London-based Mosaic Ventures, with participation from Moonfire Ventures and a number of prominent angel investors, including Jürgen Galler, a former Director at Google, Harris Barton, and AngelInvest Ventures, among others.
“With AI, code generation is scaling faster than our ability to test it, so QA will become the key bottleneck. Asheem and Momo saw this at Google before most of the industry did. What convinced us was their insistence on determinism – using AI to write tests, not to run them – which is why enterprises are trusting Klarent in production. We’re delighted to back the team as they expand to the US,” said Chandar Lal, Partner, Mosaic Ventures.
The startup was founded in 2023 by two ex-Google engineers, Asheem Panakkat, who serves as CEO, and Momchil Ivanov, who serves as CTO. Panikkar spent more than a decade at Google leading teams on Shopping and Lens, while Ivanov worked as a Staff Software Engineer focused on information retrieval. Together, they spotted how the explosion in code being written as large language models became more capable meant the systems used to verify that code were nowhere near ready to keep up.
Their solution: deterministic autonomy. Instead of leaning on large language models to run tests directly, Klarent’s agents use LLMs only to author test code. Once written, the test code executes in a deterministic, repeatable manner, combining the adaptability of AI with the rigour expected in production engineering. There is also a human-in-the-loop verification layer on top, ensuring customers pay only for verified outcomes.
“At Google, Momo and I could see two things coming at once: LLMs were getting better fast, and the amount of software being created was about to explode. The question that wouldn’t leave us was the feedback loop. How do you keep these coding agents honest? We began by building evals for LLMs and quickly realised the bigger opportunity was QA itself. As AI writes more of the world’s code, testing stops being a cost centre and becomes the thing that determines whether any of that code can be trusted,” said Panakkat.
Their approach has already won over enterprise clients across Europe. JD Sports, Swiss media group NZZ, and mobility company Sixt all use the platform. At JD Sports, Klarent’s AI agents automate multi-system workflows across the e-commerce pipeline, an automation that the retailer said its own teams could not replicate.
The funding will be used by Klarent to support its entry into the United States, building on the momentum seen with its European enterprise customers. The company also plans to grow its engineering team and broaden its cross-platform testing capabilities across web and mobile. It is also pushing into financial services, working with banks and insurance firms where the cost of a broken software release can be catastrophically high.