Generative artificial intelligence software testing startup BlinqIO Inc. said today it has closed on a $5 million round of funding to get around a shortage of human test programmers.

Today’s round was led by Flint Capital and saw participation from Inovia Capital’s Precede Fund I. BlinqIO has built what it says is the industry’s first AI test automation engineer, and says it can be used as a substitute for human test engineers, performing test scripts and maintenance tasks without any oversight.

The startup’s generative AI test engineer is powered by a proprietary large language model and has been designed to understand the requirements of software tests and also make decisions about how to execute them. It can create test automation code by itself, and maintain that code, fully autonomously. Moreover, it’s multilingual, with support for more than 50 languages.

Software testing is a vital process within the software development lifecycle. Traditionally, it has always been performed by human programmers, and involves systematically verifying and validating that a software application is free of bugs, meets the technical requirements set out by its developers, and satisfies user’s requirements.

It’s time-consuming work, and with many companies reportedly struggling with a shortage of skilled programmers, it makes more sense for those personnel to focus on higher value work, such as writing new code. As such, BlinqIO believes it has a lot to offer with its virtual test engineer, which is able to generate new test automation scripts, execute them and identify any issues that require human intervention to fix. Should it spot a bug, it will automatically open a new issue within the company’s task management system and assign it to the person who’s best qualified to deal with it.

Co-founder and Chief Executive Tal Barmeir said the company’s automated software testing tool can help enterprises to launch new software products and services more frequently, as it eliminates one of the major bottlenecks in the software development lifecycle.

“BlinqIO is already making waves in the software development sector, removing the test automation bottleneck and providing immediate feedback to developers which enables lightspeed time to market for new software products,” Barmeir said.

The startup is confident that there’s a big opportunity for test automation. It notes research from Technavio that shows how the global software testing market is forecast to grow to more than $15 billion in 2027.

Flint Capital’s general partner Sergey Gribov said he believes BlinqIO is promising for two reasons – its product and its founders.

“Generative AI software testing is in high demand on the market,” he said. “Tal Barmeir and Guy Arieli are successful founders who have exited with a product in a similar industry. We are confident that our collaboration will be long-lasting and successful.”

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