ManaMind raises £1.1M pre-seed led by SVV to build autonomous QA agents for game testing
April 30, 2026
ManaMind, a London-based startup building autonomous AI agents for game testing, has raised £1.1M (around $1.5M) in a pre-seed round led by Sure Valley Ventures, with participation from EWOR, Ascension, SyndicateRoom, and Heartfelt.
Quality assurance is one of the largest line items in modern game development, typically running at 10–15% of a title's total budget. As game worlds grow larger and live-service updates ship more frequently, the manual QA model is straining under the load. Buggy launches carry real financial consequences — Cyberpunk 2077's troubled release wiped roughly $1B from CD Projekt's market cap in days.
ManaMind replaces repetitive manual testing with autonomous agents that play through games and identify bugs the way human testers would, only faster and continuously. The platform runs on HiveMind, the company's own visual model trained specifically for virtual environments. Agents perceive games through audio and video, generate structured bug reports, and integrate into the development pipeline so studios can fix issues rather than document them.
The company says its system completes a full regression cycle in six hours and catches 86% of critical bugs before shipping. Early design partnerships are in place with mobile games studio Included Games and hypercasual developer Crazy Labs. Co-founder Emil Kostadinov, an Oxford MBA and former game tester, leads the company alongside CTO Sabtain Ahmad, who holds a PhD in machine learning from TU Wien.
The new capital will go toward expanding the engineering team, accelerating HiveMind's development, and scaling into new geographies. Gaming is the entry point, but ManaMind has signalled longer-term ambitions to apply autonomous testing to general software and robotics — domains where agents that can understand and act in complex visual environments are increasingly in demand.
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