Minitap today announced it has raised $4.1 million in seed funding co-led by Moxxie Ventures and Mercuri, with participation from EWOR, Tekton Ventures, Amigos Venture Capital, and six unicorn founders. The round comes just four months after founders Nico and Luc, both 23, achieved the #1 position globally on AndroidWorld, the industry benchmark for AI-controlled mobile devices, surpassing research teams from Google DeepMind, ByteDance, Microsoft Research, and Alibaba.
Mobile development is 10x slower than web development, even in the age of AI. While tools like Cursor and Claude enable web developers to ship features in 2 days that previously took 2 weeks, those same AI tools remain largely ineffective for mobile—unable to test on devices, iterate when things break, or verify features work across configurations. Minitap solves this bottleneck, enabling engineering teams to build mobile features in days, instead of the usual six weeks.
Nico and Luc met in Cosne-Cours-sur-Loire, a village in Burgundy, France. Nico had spent two years in military school; Luc was a child prodigy. Luc taught Nico how to code, and they studied together every day to rank in France’s top 0.1% academically. Seven years later, they’ve built every project side by side.
At 18, they created their first mobile app and bootstrapped Fuego to 10,000 users. Nico went on to study Biomedical Engineering at Imperial College London and carry out AI research, obsessed with DeepMind’s AlphaGo documentary. Luc built delivery drone infrastructure at Rakuten. Together, they combined mobile development experience, AI research expertise, and infrastructure built at scale, a combination no research lab could match.
Minitap’s technical achievement centers on two innovations: mobile-use, an open-source framework that lets AI agents control phones like humans, and minitap cloud, infrastructure that instantly spins up any phone configuration – iOS or Android – across thousands of devices in parallel. These tools connect to AI coding environments, enabling AI to write mobile code, test it on real devices, identify bugs, fix itself, and ship working features autonomously.
Within their first 40 days, Minitap claimed the #1 position on Google DeepMind’s AndroidWorld benchmark, the industry standard for measuring AI control of mobile devices. The founders then open-sourced their entire solution, advancing the field and growing their repository to 1,900 GitHub stars.
The funding round attracted a high concentration of unicorn founders and AI infrastructure experts: Thomas Wolf (Hugging Face, $4.5B valuation), Stefan Glanzer & Michael Breidenbrucker (Last.fm), Paul Muller (Adjust, >$1B exit), Petter Made (SumUp, $8B valuation), Daniel Krauss, Jochen Engert & André Schwämmlein (FlixBus, $3B valuation) and Saturnin Pugnet (Worldcoin). The round also includes operators from OpenAI, DeepMind, LangChain, and LlamaIndex.
Today, engineering teams at consumer mobile companies use Minitap to build features 10x faster. Minitap aims to enable growth teams to ship features without going through the engineering. A product manager describes a feature, provides a Figma design, and AI generates code, tests it, and ships an A/B test in one afternoon.
Longer term, the team plans to build mobile apps that optimize themselves autonomously, running experiments, analyzing user behavior, generating hypotheses, building variations, measuring results, and iterating—all without human intervention.
SEALSQ and WISeSat.Space Announce Successful Launch of WISeSat 3.0 With SpaceX
Posted in Commentary on December 1, 2025 by itnerdSEALSQ Corp and WISeSat.Space AG today announced the successful launch of WISeSat 3.0 aboard a SpaceX mission.
WISeSat 3.0 is the first satellite to embed the SEALSQ Quantum RootKey, marking a significant advancement in the development of quantum-safe satellite communications and inaugurating a space-based proof-of-concept for Post-Quantum Key Distribution (QKD) designed to protect global digital infrastructure from future quantum threats.
To support its strategic roadmap, SEALSQ has invested $10 million in WISeSat.Space, strengthening its position as a strategic investor in the WISeSat satellite constellation. This investment accelerates the rollout of the satellite network, strengthens QKD capabilities, and enables the deployment of a scalable Satellite-as-a-Service model that integrates decentralized IoT transactions and post-quantum-secure communications. By 2027, WISeSat.Space aims to operate a large constellation embedding WISeKey cryptographic keys and SEALSQ’s post-quantum semiconductor technology to ensure sovereign and resilient quantum-resistant communications from space.
Earlier this month, SEALSQ’s parent company, WISeKey International Holding AG, WISeKey International Holding AG, a global leader in cybersecurity, digital identity, and IoT solutions platform, in association with Columbus Acquisition Corp, announced the signing of a definitive business combination agreement to merge Columbus and WISeSat, creating a public company listed on the Nasdaq Stock Exchange named WISeSat.Space Holdings Corp.
At the heart of WISeSat 3.0 is the Quantum Shield QS7001 the first quantum resistant secure hardware platform designed to resist both classical and quantum cyberattacks. The satellite supports on-orbit generation and management of cryptographic keys, secure encryption and authentication processes, and the use of NIST-standardized post-quantum algorithms such as CRYSTALS-Kyber and CRYSTALS-Dilithium. By isolating cryptographic operations inside a tamper-resistant environment, the Quantum Shield QS7001 enables end-to-end secure space communications
WISeSat 3.0 aims at delivering secure command authentication, encrypted telemetry for Earth observation and defense missions, and quantum-safe key distribution for critical infrastructure sectors including energy, transportation, and smart cities. The satellite could also enable the secure onboarding of billions of IoT devices by providing quantum-resistant digital identities from orbit, extending trusted connectivity even to remote or underserved regions. Technologies from WISeKey, SEALSQ, and Hedera are progressively integrated across the WISeSat platform, allowing the constellation to serve as a benchmark for post-quantum security in space. This integration will further support the use of trusted digital tokens, including SEALCOIN, enabling secure space-to-ground transactions and tokenized satellite services.
WISeSat.Space has expanded its ground infrastructure with a dedicated satellite antenna in La Línea, Spain, and plans for an additional installation in Switzerland. This network enhances real-time monitoring, mission control, and the secure management of the growing satellite constellation. As the quantum era approaches, the need for secure space-based infrastructure becomes increasingly urgent. SEALSQ’s Post-Quantum security architecture provides immediate and resilient protection against key extraction, spoofing, and eavesdropping, offering secure key isolation, signature validation, and quantum-resilient encryption that ensures any attempt to intercept or manipulate communications is instantly detectable.
The WISeSat platform is also engineered to leverage the unique properties of space, including microgravity, to enable advancements in quantum sensing, unspoofable positioning and timing (PNT), secure deep-space exploration, and the in-orbit manufacturing of quantum components in pristine environments. These breakthroughs position WISeSat 3.0 as a strategically important asset at a time of rising geopolitical tensions and growing demand for sovereign, secure, and quantum-resistant digital infrastructure.
With this launch, SEALSQ and WISeSat are laying the foundation for a new generation of cyber-resilient, quantum-ready space systems, reinforcing the commitment of Europe and its allies to space sovereignty and secure digital transformation. Together, the companies are redefining global digital trust from orbit and enabling the secure communications backbone of the future.
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