Sabtain Ahmad

Sabtain Ahmad is the co-founder and CTO of ManaMind, a London-based startup building autonomous AI agents for game testing. Of Pakistani heritage, he completed his PhD in machine learning at TU Wien, where he specialised in distributed machine learning, edge intelligence, and IoT — work that earned him a Netidee scholarship for his doctoral dissertation.

Before founding ManaMind, Sabtain spent his academic career publishing research on machine learning systems, with his work cited more than 200 times. He brings the technical foundation behind HiveMind, ManaMind's proprietary visual model purpose-built for virtual environments, where AI agents need to perceive game worlds the way human players do.

At ManaMind, Sabtain leads the engineering and research effort to extend autonomous testing from gaming into broader software and, eventually, robotics. The company raised £1.1M in pre-seed funding in April 2026, led by Sure Valley Ventures, with design partnerships already in place at Included Games and Crazy Labs.