Holmes Raises $1.2M Pre-Seed for AI-Powered QA Testing

Jan de Vries · 2026-05-12

Holmes, a startup that automates software testing with AI, has officially launched after raising $1.2 million in pre-Seed funding. The company aims to catch software bugs before they ever reach users, a growing pain point as development speeds up. ### What Holmes Does Holmes is an autonomous quality assurance (QA) platform. It learns how people actually use a product, then continuously tests those user flows. The tool integrates directly into the development teams' existing workflows, so there's no extra setup or manual work. Instead of relying on engineers to write and update tests, Holmes watches how real users interact with an app. It then creates tests that verify those journeys automatically, even as the product changes. This means teams can move fast without sacrificing quality. ### The Funding Round The round was led by Syndicate One. Other investors include Aikido founders Roeland Delrue and Willem Delbare, Showpad co-founder Louis Jonckheere, and serial entrepreneur Thomas Van Overbeke. Funds NewSchool, RDY, and 100IN also participated. "Code today is written faster than ever, often with the help of AI. But whether the product actually works the way users expect is a different story," says Robin Praet, co-founder of Holmes. "Holmes covers that exact gap: not whether the code is right, but whether the product holds up in real use." ### The Team Behind Holmes Holmes was founded by three Belgian tech entrepreneurs with solid exit experience. Robin Praet and Robbrecht Delrue previously co-founded Smartendr, an ordering platform for hospitality that OrderBilly acquired in September 2025. Sofie Buyse was the first hire at Henchman, an AI tool for legal professionals, which LexisNexis bought for $160 million in June 2024. ### Why QA Has Become a Bottleneck According to the company, QA is slowing teams down. Engineers have to manually write and maintain tests. QA testers click through products to check everything still works. AI tools like Claude and Codex help developers write code faster, but what looks correct in code can still break in a real-world environment. Teams end up caught between two bad choices: sacrifice the speed AI gives them, or let bugs slip through to users. Holmes says it solves that by running tests in the background, continuously. ### How Holmes Works Differently Holmes doesn't rely on manual test writing. Instead, it learns the full journey a user takes through a product, from sign-up to checkout to search. The platform uses five specialized AI agents to handle different scenarios: - Happy paths (normal user flows) - Edge cases (unusual inputs or behavior) - Responsive layouts (different screen sizes) - Accessibility (ensuring usability for all) - Error recovery (handling failures gracefully) These agents run automatically, even as the product evolves. The company is already working with 30 design partners to shape the product, with broader access coming in the next few months. ### A Real Problem, A Real Solution "At Henchman, I ran into it myself: QA is work everybody knows is critical, but nobody wants to own," says Sofie Buyse, product manager at Holmes. "Skilled QA testers are hard to find and expensive to hire, so testing usually falls on product managers and developers, on top of everything else they're already doing." Buyse adds that when people lose focus for even a moment, bugs end up in front of users. "That's why we built Holmes: it takes testing off their plate and runs it continuously in the background, so the team can keep building without worry." ### Advisory Board Holmes has a group of tech leaders advising on product development. They include Dieter Wachters (Senior Director of Engineering at Collibra), Haroen Vermylen (co-founder and CTO of Luzmo), Jaap Vergote (co-founder of Upsellplus), and Ivo Minjauw (CPO of Lighthouse).