Shakil Hanjgikar gives his wife a place at the beginning of his entrepreneurial story. She was working for a recruitment company in New York; the company was building an application. He recognised the work that would follow. Software being built would need software being tested. Some business beginnings arrive with a pitch deck. This one, in his telling, arrived with a practical observation.
He is now the co-founder and CEO of VTEST, the Pune-based software testing company that started in 2015. He also goes by Shak. The company gives him another title, Chief Testomaniac, which has considerably more personality than the average entry on an organisation chart. Beneath the joke is a professional continuity: the founder remains closely identified with the work on which the business was built.
An application, and an opening
His preparation included an MBA in finance and an education that took place in his father’s business. There, he learned about managing resources. He has described that experience as the practical grounding beneath the qualification. The family enterprise supplied lessons that could be used again when the responsibility became his own.
“The motivation or the first step came from my wife.”
Shakil Hanjgikar
Wanting to become an entrepreneur still meant considering the appeal of a regular salary. He has acknowledged that hesitation. It is a recognisable detail in a founder’s story: the attraction of independence can coexist quite comfortably with an appreciation of payday. An opportunity becomes more consequential when accepting it changes who must make the decisions.
VTEST’s business is independent software testing. Its services span functional testing, automation, performance and security. The company’s account of its beginning is straightforward: help brands build better software. Shak’s experience of testing across the US, UK and India gave that ambition a professional background. The commercial base was Pune; the work could travel.
There are two dates to keep in view. VTEST dates its beginning to 2015. The Indian legal entity, VTEST Software Private Limited, was incorporated on 29 March 2019, with Shakil Hanjgikar appointed a director that day. A business beginning and a company registration can occupy different points in the same history. The distinction gives the story its proper sequence.
A buyer, a seller, and a better question
A useful way into VTEST’s thinking is an exercise involving an online shop. Give one tester the buyer’s role and another the seller’s. Ask them to carry out the transaction. Can the buyer purchase what they intend? Does the seller receive the financial benefit? Can either party bypass the process? Then have the testers exchange roles and try again.
The role swap is a small piece of theatre with a business purpose. It directs attention toward the transaction and the people attempting it. A screen may behave politely while a commercial process goes astray. The exercise asks testers to investigate the whole exchange, including the experience of making the purchase and the rules that are supposed to govern it.
the purchase?
deliver its value?
For a founder whose background includes finance and a family business, this is an apt meeting of interests. Testing asks what happens. Business asks what that means. The exercise gives both questions room. It is also easy to explain without a technical glossary, a quality many software conversations could profitably borrow.
The teacher inside the tester
Shak’s conference biography describes VTEST as his second independent software testing firm. It also records training and mentoring more than 100 testers. That places the transmission of the craft beside the running of the company. There are clients to serve and colleagues who must develop the judgment to serve them.
His proposed sessions for Appium Conf 2019 show two interests at work. One explored adding AI to Appium, a tool used for mobile test automation. Another proposed an interactive session on testing more quickly and improving application quality, using games and assignments. These were proposals; their descriptions still offer a specific glimpse of the subjects he wanted to teach.
The combination is pleasingly practical. New tools have a place, and so does getting people to participate. A proposed exercise tells us something different from a job title: it shows how a practitioner hopes another person might learn. In this case, the lesson was intended to involve the room.
Even the testing company needs customers
There is another revealing view of Hanjgikar: the founder as a buyer. In a verified July 2023 review, he described hiring Digital Dadi for VTEST’s marketing and website work. The objectives included generating leads, improving search visibility and managing social media. A referral introduced the supplier. Budget, cultural fit and value helped determine the choice.
His account makes the commercial work concrete. The engagement covered social media, website maintenance and Google advertising. He reported monthly leads, better rankings for some searches and a growing LinkedIn audience. He also praised the supplier’s knowledge and initiative. These were his assessments as a customer, and they show the considerations he chose to put on record.
A software services business has to explain itself as well as deliver. In that review, the testing specialist appears on the other side of the relationship, deciding whom to trust with work outside his own central discipline. The familiar questions return: can this partner understand the business, respond to an idea and produce something useful?
New machinery, familiar questions
AI now occupies a substantial part of Shak’s public writing. In November 2025, he described a vision of testing agents that could generate scenarios, adapt tests when interfaces change and provide useful context when something fails. He argued for a division of effort in which machines handle repetitive checks while people concentrate on risk, exploration and difficult cases.
His aspirations extended to predicting likely defects, creating tests from ordinary language and improving test suites through feedback. These are directions he has advocated. The personal thread is the continued interest in changing how testing gets done, an interest already visible in his earlier Appium proposal.
By January 2026, his attention also encompassed the people doing the work. He urged testers to strengthen programming, automation and systems knowledge. He argued that judgment would matter more as generating and executing tests became easier. For leaders, his advice included making time for learning and measuring useful quality insights rather than treating activity counts as the destination.
That view carries a demand for the founder as well. A testing company’s ability to adapt depends partly on whether its people can acquire the capabilities it needs. Tools can be introduced by decision. Competence requires practice. His argument makes professional development part of the operating question.
- Map the application
- Generate tests using project context
- Run tests and diagnose failures
- Review with a QA lead
- Approve the retest
Human review is part of the process the company describes.
VTEST’s May 2026 explanation supplies a useful operational detail. The company describes internal AI testing infrastructure, with generated tests reviewed by people and retesting subject to a QA lead’s approval. Its account also includes recorded evidence and failure diagnosis. Responsibility has explicit places in the workflow.
The company’s agentic testing services address a related problem: testing software that itself contains AI agents. Its listed work includes checking interactions between agents, consistency between prompts and behaviour, memory handling and integration with external tools. The tester’s subject has become more complicated. The need to understand the intended business behaviour remains.
His present responsibilities include global client relationships and strategy, with VTEST describing work across the UK, UAE, India, the US and Singapore. The company’s advice to engineering leaders allows for different arrangements: keep testing inside when it is central to the product, buy specialist help when capacity or speed requires it, or combine the two. That flexibility provides context for his role. Leading a services company involves deciding where its work fits within another organisation, as well as deciding how its own team should perform it. The testing expertise has to survive the handover into a working relationship.
The responsibility reaches the top
In March 2026, Hanjgikar argued that software quality belongs among a CEO’s responsibilities. His examples connected failed transactions, lost customers and reputational damage with executive decisions. He called for attention to customer-impacting incidents and the reliability of important business flows. The testing conversation had reached the person who signs off on priorities.
That is a fitting destination for this particular career. He has worked as a tester and runs a testing company. He knows the business as a supplier and has publicly evaluated another supplier as a client. His public work keeps bringing technical choices back into contact with commercial consequences.
For all the changes in vocabulary, there is an appealingly ordinary idea underneath: somebody should check that the thing does what people need it to do. Shakil Hanjgikar has built a business around that task. The CEO has acquired more decisions. The tester still has questions.