ai-testing
(9)
Ryo Chikazawa
Ryo Chikazawa is the co-founder and CEO of Autify, an AI-powered software testing automation company based in San Francisco and Tokyo. A software engineer who worked in Japan, Singapore, and the US, he kept running into the same problem everywhere: testing software takes too long. After eight pivots and interviewing 70+ prospects, he built Autify into a no-code test automation platform used by companies like Unity, DeNA, and ZOZO, raising roughly $32M through Series B and launching Autify Genesis, an autonomous AI testing agent.
Vu Lam
Vu Lam is the founder and CEO of Katalon, one of the world's most widely used software test automation platforms, trusted by more than 30,000 teams. A Vietnamese-American engineer who arrived in the United States as an 11-year-old refugee, he built a career at Bell Labs before founding a string of technology companies including KMS Technology, QASymphony, Kobiton and Grove HR. Katalon began as an internal productivity tool inside KMS Technology and grew into a standalone company that raised $27 million in Series A funding in 2021. Lam is known for championing quality-assurance professionals and pushing testing into the AI era.
Nicolai Baldin
Nicolai Baldin is the co-founder and CEO of Synthesized, a London and New York-based DataOps and AI-powered test data automation platform he launched after a PhD in machine learning and statistics at the University of Cambridge. Synthesized generates synthetic, compliant, production-like data that enterprises use to test software, train models, and share information across regulatory boundaries. In September 2025 the company raised a $20M Series A led by Redalpine to expand into automated software testing for the age of 'vibe coding.'
Gal Vered
Gal Vered is the co-founder and CEO of Checksum.ai, a San Francisco startup that uses AI to automatically generate, run, and self-heal end-to-end software tests in Playwright and Cypress. A former Google product manager, Y Combinator-backed CTO, Kellogg MBA, and Israeli Navy officer, Vered is betting that as AI writes more of the world's code, the scarce and valuable skill becomes verification - proving the software actually works. Checksum sells testing as a result rather than a tool, generating 100-150 tests in a customer's first week and keeping them green as the product changes.
Yunhao Jiao
Yunhao Jiao is the co-founder and CEO of TestSprite, a Seattle startup building an autonomous AI testing agent that aims to be the verification layer for AI-generated code. A competitive programmer turned AWS engineer, he left a five-year run at Amazon after a single production regression on an on-call shift convinced him that verification, not generation, had become software's weakest link. Since founding TestSprite in 2023 with Shawnie Shan and Rui Li, he has grown it to roughly 100,000 developers and raised about $8.1 million across pre-seed and seed rounds, led most recently by Trilogy Equity Partners.
Fred Stevens-Smith
Fred Stevens-Smith is the British co-founder and CEO of Rainforest QA, a San Francisco-based no-code test automation platform that has run over 60 million software tests for more than 10,000 product teams. A Y Combinator W2012 alumnus who self-describes as 'pretty unemployable,' Fred pivoted from failed AWS analytics ideas to QA 30 days before Demo Day after cold-emailing his entire network and finding universal demand for better software testing. Backed by Bessemer Venture Partners, Jason Lemkin, Marc Benioff, and Garry Tan, Rainforest QA has raised $42.3M and now leads the market in AI-powered, self-healing test automation.
Summer Weisberg
Summer Weisberg is the CEO of Testlio, an AI-powered managed crowdsourced testing platform headquartered in Palo Alto, California. Appointed to the role in February 2026 after serving as COO and Interim CEO, she brings over 15 years of experience spanning software engineering, enterprise testing, professional services, and customer success. Before Testlio, she held senior roles at CloudBees, CA Technologies, FedEx, and Silicon Graphics. An advocate for diversity in tech and a sharp critic of AI-for-AI's-sake, she champions human judgment in quality engineering - insisting that AI without a solid quality foundation just makes mistakes faster.
Mohamed Elgendy
Mohamed Elgendy is the Co-Founder and CEO of Kolena, a San Francisco-based AI testing and validation platform that raised $21M to help enterprises build reliable, trustworthy AI systems. An Egyptian-American technologist and author of the widely-read 'Deep Learning for Vision Systems' (Manning Publications, 20,000+ copies sold), Elgendy cut his teeth building AI/ML organizations at Amazon, Twilio, Rakuten, and Synapse (acquired by Palantir) before founding Kolena in 2021. His mission: bring software engineering rigor - unit testing, regression analysis, scenario-level validation - to a field that has long relied on aggregate accuracy scores that mask real-world failures.
Scott Clark
Scott Clark is the Co-founder and CEO of Distributional, an enterprise AI testing platform that helps companies identify behavioral drift and unknown failures in AI systems. A triple-degree graduate of Oregon State University with a PhD in Applied Mathematics from Cornell, he co-founded and sold SigOpt (a Bayesian optimization platform backed by Y Combinator and a16z) to Intel in 2020, then led 200 engineers as VP & GM of AI/HPC Supercomputing at Intel before founding Distributional in September 2023. The company raised $30M in under a year, including a $19M Series A led by Two Sigma Ventures in October 2024.