Ryo Chikazawa spent a decade writing software in Japan, Singapore, and San Francisco. Everywhere he went, one thing was broken the same way - testing took too long. So he quit, pivoted eight times, and turned that pain into a company.
There is a version of the startup story where the founder has a flash of genius, builds the thing, and the world rewards him. Ryo Chikazawa's story is the opposite. He had the genius part backwards - he found the problem long before he found the product, and he was willing to throw away almost everything to get there.
Before Autify, Chikazawa was a working software engineer, not a pitch-deck founder. He wrote code in Japan, then Singapore, then San Francisco. At DeNA in Tokyo he helped build a social game that reached number one. At Viki in Singapore he was a product engineer inside a subtitling community that translated more than a billion words into over two hundred languages. Three countries, three very different companies, three different stacks.
And in all of them, the same thing kept slowing everyone down: testing the software. Making sure the app still worked after every change. It was tedious, it was expensive, and it never got easier. That repetition is the seed of the whole company.
Manually making sure your offering functions properly is impossible, yet there is a lack of talented automation engineers, and existing QA methods are high-maintenance and slow.
Ryo Chikazawa, Co-founder & CEO, AutifyMost engineers complain about testing and move on. Chikazawa noticed something more useful: the complaint was universal. It did not matter whether the company was a Japanese gaming giant or a Southeast Asian streaming platform or a scrappy San Francisco startup where he was one of the first hires. Everyone was fighting the same fire, and nobody had put it out.
His read on the market was blunt. Roughly three out of four companies were still running their software tests by hand, clicking through the same flows over and over. In a world of constant releases, endless browsers, and a shortage of automation specialists, that math does not work.
Chikazawa founded Autify in San Francisco in 2016. It did not arrive fully formed. The company was incubated inside the Alchemist Accelerator under a different name, Beehive, and the early product was not the one people use today. It took eight pivots to get there.
That number is easy to type and brutal to live. Eight times, he had a plan, chased it, and watched it fall short of the scale a venture-backed company needs. After two years he reached the conclusion most founders avoid for as long as they can: the thing he had been building would never be big enough. So he scrapped it and went looking for what his customers actually needed - the burning need, in his words - rather than what he wanted to build.
After two years and eight pivots, he stopped building and started listening. Then he found the problem worth solving.
The Autify origin storyHere is the part other founders should steal. When Chikazawa landed on the idea that became Autify, he did not disappear into a garage for six months. He interviewed more than seventy prospects. He talked to the people who felt the testing pain and asked them exactly what they would pay to make it stop. And then he did something that sounds backwards - he secured contracts before writing a single line of code for the new product.
It is a quiet form of discipline. Selling first forces you to confront whether anyone truly wants the thing while it is still cheap to change your mind. By the time the engineering started, the demand was already proven. Autify graduated from Alchemist and launched Autify NoCode, an AI-powered, no-code test automation tool aimed squarely at the teams who could not hire enough automation engineers.
The funding followed the proof. Autify announced a $2.5M seed round in 2019 alongside a global launch. In October 2021 it raised a $10M Series A led by World Innovation Lab, with Salesforce Ventures and Uncorrelated Ventures among the backers, and shipped Autify for Mobile. In 2024 came a $13M Series B - roughly $32M in total - and a new flagship idea.
The customer list did the talking too. Unity, DeNA, ZOZO, and Q4 all put Autify to work - the kind of names that turn a testing tool from a nice idea into infrastructure.
The 2024 launch was Autify Genesis, an autonomous AI agent built to generate test cases and test scripts on its own, combining AI with the open-source Playwright framework. It is the logical end of the thesis Chikazawa has carried since his DeNA days: the repetitive parts of software quality should not need a human clicking through them.
His framing of AI is worth pausing on, because it is not the usual replacement story. He does not pitch machines taking jobs. He pitches machines taking the boring work, so people are freed up to create - and, he argues, so society gets more productive as a result. It is an optimistic reading, and it happens to describe exactly what his product does.
Chikazawa holds a computer science degree from Seikei University in Japan and speaks Japanese, English, and Chinese - a range that maps neatly onto a company run across Tokyo and San Francisco. He has taken the story on the road too, speaking at STARWEST, Dreamforce, and UC Berkeley about test automation and agile ways of working.
What holds the whole arc together is patience. The billion words at Viki, the decade of engineering, the eight pivots, the seventy interviews - none of it is the flashy part of a founder biography. It is the accumulation. He treated a common annoyance as a signal worth ten years of attention, and built a company on the belief that the unglamorous problems are the valuable ones.
The lesson tucked inside his path is almost anti-heroic: you do not need the perfect first idea. You need to notice a real problem, refuse to fall in love with your own solution, and keep listening until the market tells you what it will pay for. Chikazawa did that eight times over. The result now writes its own tests.