How Startup Holmes Plans to Automate Software Testing in the AI Development Era

Key capabilities include:

• Learning real user flows: The system observes how users interact with a product and builds an understanding of typical workflows.
• Autonomous testing agents: AI agents continuously run through these workflows to detect issues before users encounter them.
• Script‑free testing: Because tests are generated from observed behavior, teams don’t have to maintain brittle test scripts.
• Integration with existing tools: The platform runs inside tools development teams already use, fitting into existing engineering workflows.

In practical terms, teams can provide a product URL and allow the system to explore the application, run tests across key flows, and report problems automatically.

Founders Behind Holmes

Holmes was founded in Ghent by three entrepreneurs:

• Robin Praet
• Robbrecht Delrue
• Sofie Buyse

The founding team has prior startup experience and previous exits, which helped shape the company’s approach to solving real engineering workflow problems.

Investors Backing the €1.1M Pre‑Seed Round

Holmes launched with €1.1 million in pre‑seed funding to build and scale its autonomous QA platform.

The round was led by Syndicate One, with participation from several well‑known figures in the Belgian startup ecosystem, including:

• Roeland Delrue and Willem Delbare, founders of cybersecurity startup Aikido
• Louis Jonckheere, co‑founder of Showpad
• Thomas Van Overbeke, serial entrepreneur
• Investment funds NewSchool.vc, RDY Capital, and 100IN

The investor group reflects strong backing from experienced operators within the region’s technology ecosystem.

What the Funding Will Support

The pre‑seed capital will primarily be used to:

• further develop the autonomous QA platform
• expand the engineering team
• scale adoption beyond early collaborators and design partners

At the time of launch, Holmes was already working with around 30 design partners to refine the product in real development environments.

Why Autonomous QA Is Becoming Critical

As AI tools accelerate the speed of software creation, the main challenge for engineering teams is shifting from writing code to ensuring that rapidly changing systems still behave correctly for users.

Platforms like Holmes aim to close that gap by turning testing into a continuous, AI‑driven process rather than a manual task that slows down releases. If the approach works, QA could evolve from a bottleneck into an automated safety layer for the AI‑generated software era.