test-automation
(15)
Rajeev Rai Built a Company Around the Work Everyone Notices Too Late
He sold sweaters at 11, learned quality inside Apple, and later made software testing the center of a cross-border company. His enduring product is less a test script than a way of treating engineers.
Nishant Hooda Applied to YC Four Times. Then He Made Software Testing Look at the Screen.
An AWS internship introduced him to his future co-founder. Four applications got them into Y Combinator. Now Docket is betting that the next generation of software tests will use the screen the way people do.
Gabriel Spencer-Harper Is Building a Safety Net for Software Written at Machine Speed
Before AI made code cheap, Gabriel Spencer-Harper was already obsessed with the expensive part: proving it works. His company, Meticulous, turns real user journeys into a living test suite - and a career of false starts into a sharp thesis about software's new bottleneck.
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.
Tony Sumpster
Tony Sumpster is the CEO of Provar, the Salesforce-focused test automation company, a role he took on in December 2024. A veteran enterprise-software leader with roughly 25 years across corporate, private equity, and venture-backed companies, he previously ran Worksoft and Data Intensity as CEO and led Hewlett Packard Enterprise's largest software business unit as SVP and GM. He is known for turning around and scaling technology organizations and for building teams around diversity, passion, ability, and belief.
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.
Pankaj Goel
Pankaj Goel is the co-founder and CEO of Opkey, a no-code, AI-driven test automation platform used by more than 250 enterprises to keep cloud ERP systems - Oracle, Workday, SAP, Salesforce, Coupa - from breaking on every quarterly update. He founded Opkey in 2016 after spending a decade running Crestech Software Systems, and before that worked on the automation teams behind Adobe InDesign and Illustrator. In August 2024 Opkey raised a $47M Series B led by PeakSpan Capital.
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.
Dmitry Fonarev
Dmitry Fonarev is the co-founder and CEO of Testkube, the Kubernetes-native test orchestration platform that has powered over 100 million automated tests for customers including Cloudflare, Siemens, Adobe, and Volvo. A Boston University computer science graduate with more than two decades building engineering teams at Dell, SmartBear, and vKernel, he co-founded Kubeshop in 2021 with SoapUI creator Ole Lensmar, then spun Testkube out as a standalone company that raised an $8M Series A in 2025.
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.
Tamas Cser
Tamas Cser is the founder and CEO of Functionize, a San Francisco-based AI-powered test automation platform that has raised $60M+ and grown to $17.3M ARR. A former child violin prodigy who toured the world before pivoting to software, Cser spent nearly a decade running a consulting firm before founding Functionize in 2014 with a singular obsession: making enterprise software testing autonomous. Under his leadership, Functionize has grown to 120 employees, landed marquee customers including Salesforce, and logged over one billion agentic AI actions in 2024 alone.
Darwin Thangappan
Darwin Thangappan is the CEO and founder of ASIR Technologies, a bootstrapped enterprise technology company headquartered in Milpitas, California, with development operations in Bangalore, India. A mechanical engineering graduate turned software entrepreneur, Darwin spent nine years at Oracle building and managing JD Edwards EnterpriseOne before launching ASIR Technologies in 2014. Under his leadership, the company has grown to 75+ employees and developed ACRA Suite, a 100% no-code automation platform that slashes regression testing time by 60% across JD Edwards, Oracle E-Business Suite, SAP, and Salesforce environments. Honored by Marquis Who's Who in 2025 for excellence in technology and product development, Darwin also holds a U.S. patent for computer user interface technology.
Mathieu Planche
Mathieu Planche is the CEO and Director of R&D at Witbe, a Paris-founded, publicly traded company (Euronext Growth) that builds AI-powered robots and platforms for video Quality of Experience monitoring and automated testing. Since taking the helm in 2019, he has steered Witbe through a rapid AI transformation - from hardware testing appliances to the industry's first agent-native video QA platform - serving 300+ broadcasters, OTT providers, and telecom operators across 120+ countries. A dual-degree engineer from CentraleSupélec and Georgia Tech, Planche rose through every rung of the Witbe ladder: consultant, UI designer, Americas ops manager, Chief Experience Officer, and Chief Product Officer before becoming CEO.
Rohan Marfatia
Rohan Marfatia is the CEO of DataCRaiM, Inc. (formerly Beround), a technology consulting firm specializing in Data, AI, and CRM solutions for equipment leasing, finance, and MedTech/healthcare sectors. With over 20 years of experience across India, the UK, the Netherlands, and the United States, he has built a career at the intersection of enterprise technology and human-centered leadership. A TEDx and keynote speaker, President of IAMCP Northern California, and a 2024 Fremont mayoral candidate, Marfatia is also running for Alameda County Supervisor in 2026. He holds an MBA from Washington University in St. Louis and an engineering degree from Sardar Patel University.
Sushil Kumar
Sushil Kumar is CEO of Cyara, the AI-powered customer experience assurance platform trusted by global enterprises to test and monitor over 350 million customer interactions annually across 135+ countries. A builder with 25+ years scaling category-defining platforms, he co-founded RelicX.ai (acquired by Harness), scaled Oracle Enterprise Manager into a $1B+ business, and led CA Technologies' $500M AIOps division and Broadcom's $200M+ DevOps portfolio before taking the helm at Cyara in December 2025 to lead the next phase of AI-driven CX assurance.