Sofy raises cash to grow its no-code mobile app testing platform

techcrunch.com:

Sofy, a startup developing a testing platform for mobile app devs it claims is used by Microsoft, today closed a $7.75 million seed round that brings its total capital raised to $9.5 million. Voyager Capital led the tranche with participation from PSL Ventures, GTMFund and Revolution, providing cash that CEO Syed Hamid says will be put toward supporting Sof’s general growth and R&D.

Sofy was co-launched in 2016 by Hamid, Hyder Ali and Usman Zubair. Prior to it, Syed was an engineering leader at Microsoft for nearly two decades. Ali also spent the bulk of his career at Microsoft, while Zubair — another Microsoft veteran — has several startups under his belt besides Sofy, including Enfoundery, a tech consultancy for entrepreneurs.

“Software testing hasn’t changed in the past 40 years. It’s still done manually with significant cost of creation and maintenance,” Hamid told TechCrunch in an email interview. “The time is right with advancements in machine learning and AI to evolve to a modern no-code testing process and intelligent automation.”

Sofy validates changes in app code directly from existing dev environments. Delivering insights that spotlight issues in the code, Sofy tries to account for different devices and operating systems on which the code might run, recording metrics like speed and responsiveness as well as vulnerability to cyberattacks.

Image Credits: Sofy

“We have a dataset of over 17,000 publicly available mobile apps to enhance our no-code platform and improve the resilience and efficiency of applications. We are able to run automation on thousands of different device matrices,” Hamid said.

Developers might balk at Sofy’s analytics capabilities, which attempt to quantify dev “performance and productivity.” But