ManaMind, an autonomous game testing startup, has raised £1.1 million in a pre-seed round led by SVV (Sure Valley Ventures), with participation from EWOR, Ascension, Syndicate Room, and Heartfelt. It develops AI agents that test video games by playing through them and identifying bugs. The funding will be used to expand the technical team, accelerate proprietary model development, and scale across key geographies.
Quality assurance remains one of the most expensive and time-consuming aspects of modern game development, typically accounting for 10-15% of a game's total budget. As games become larger and more complex, the cost of ensuring a polished player experience is increasing. ManaMind replaces repetitive manual QA with autonomous agents that run continuous testing alongside development, completing full regression cycles in 6 hours and catching 86% of critical bugs before shipping.
The platform generates actionable reports, allowing development teams to focus on fixing issues rather than documenting them. Early deployments show that the system identifies bugs that human testers often miss. ManaMind has secured design partnerships with Included Games and Crazy Labs, validating both the technical capability and market demand for autonomous QA infrastructure.
The global games industry is valued at $250 billion, with modern AAA titles shipping with 1000+ hours of content across multiple platforms. Release windows continue to compress, while live-service games require continuous regression testing for frequent updates. Buggy launches can have significant financial consequences, as demonstrated by Cyberpunk 2077's release, which initially wiped $1 billion from CD Projekt's market capitalisation.
ManaMind was founded by Emil Kostadinov, an Oxford MBA and EWOR Fellow who worked as a game tester, and Sabtain Ahmad, who holds a PhD in Machine Learning. The founding team aims to extend the technology beyond gaming to broader software and robotics applications.
The future of game development should be about human creativity, not repetitive testing. We're automating the manual, time-consuming parts so studios can focus on building amazing worlds. We've developed our own proprietary visual model specifically for virtual environments because gaming demands that level of precision. Gaming is our launchpad, but our vision is to build the autonomous testing layer for all software and, ultimately, robotics.
ManaMind is solving a critical pain point in game development at the intersection of AI-in-gaming and Intelligent Automation - two rapidly growing sectors. Emil and Sabtain combine deep technical expertise with firsthand understanding of the QA challenge. Their autonomous agents complete in six hours what takes manual QA teams days - and they catch bugs that human testers miss. That's the kind of measurable improvement we back.
