Zurich’s Klarent raises €7.13m to take AI software testing to the US

Zurich-based Klarent has raised €7.13 million in seed funding to expand its autonomous software testing platform and enter the United States, according to EU-Startups. The move will take the Swiss company beyond a European enterprise customer base that includes JD Sports, Swiss media group NZZ and mobility company Sixt.

London-based Mosaic Ventures led the round, with participation from Moonfire Ventures and investors including former Google director Jürgen Galler, Harris Barton and AngelInvest Ventures. Alongside US entry, Klarent plans to grow its engineering team and broaden its cross-platform testing capabilities across web and mobile.

The funding backs a specific proposition: as AI tools generate more software, checking that it works becomes a constraint on how quickly businesses can release it. Klarent is positioning itself around that verification problem rather than code generation itself.

AI writes the tests, but does not run them

Klarent, formerly known as fore ai, was founded in 2023 by two former Google engineers: chief executive Asheem Panakkat and chief technology officer Momchil Ivanov. Panakkat spent more than a decade at Google leading teams on Shopping and Lens, while Ivanov worked as a staff software engineer focused on information retrieval.

The founders initially built evaluations for large language models before turning to software quality assurance. Their platform uses LLMs to author test code, but the resulting code then executes in a deterministic, repeatable manner. That separates the AI-driven creation of a test from its execution—a distinction central to Klarent’s pitch to enterprise customers.

The platform also includes a human-in-the-loop verification layer. According to the report, customers pay only for verified outcomes. The approach is intended to combine AI’s adaptability with the consistency required to check software used in production.

“What convinced us was their insistence on determinism – using AI to write tests, not to run them – which is why enterprises are trusting Klarent in production,” Mosaic Ventures partner Chandar Lal told EU-Startups. “We’re delighted to back the team as they expand to the US.”

European customers provide the starting point

Klarent’s US push follows adoption by European enterprises across retail, media and mobility. At JD Sports, its agents automate multi-system workflows across the e-commerce pipeline. EU-Startups reports that the retailer said its own teams had been unable to replicate that automation.

Those deployments give Klarent customer references for its expansion, although the report provides no revenue figures, contract values or total customer count. It also does not identify a US office location, launch timetable or US customers. The announced move is therefore a funded market-entry plan, rather than evidence of an established American operation.

A reliability pitch for the next market

Strategically, the US expansion will test whether Klarent can extend its European enterprise traction into another market with the same reliability-led proposition. Its stated point of differentiation is not simply using AI in testing, but limiting the model’s role so that test execution remains repeatable.

Klarent is also pushing into financial services, working with banks and insurers where software failures can carry particularly high costs. That sector push, together with broader web and mobile capabilities, ties its growth plans to more demanding testing requirements. The seed round will fund both geographic expansion and the product and engineering work needed to support that ambition.