RPA startup Mesmer has today announced its official launch as well as a $15m Series A round led by Intel Capital, with participation from True Ventures.

Mesmer is founded by the Zenprise team that built and sold its mobile device management solution to Citrix for $355m in 2012.

According to Ahmed Datoo, co-founder and COO, Mesmer, it is the first vendor to bring RPA to software developers. The startup’s patent-pending Deep Learning Automation™ (DLA) uses AI, specifically computer vision, natural language processing, and path planning models to test apps in a customer-centric way. Mesmer will use the funding to aggressively market to the $40bn testing market.

“40% 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 RPA to compress a process that can literally take 10 days into 35 minutes, all the while improving the quality of the customer experience.”

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According to a spokesperson, Mesmer’s software functions much like a self-driving car: software robots crawl through every nook and cranny of apps recognising 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.”

“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 AI for this task is disruptive, and we look forward to working with the team to address this growing need in the industry.”

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