Holmes, a technology startup automating software testing in the AI era, has launched with a €1.1 million pre-Seed funding round.
The round was led by Syndicate One, with participation from Aikido founders Roeland Delrue and Willem Delbare, Showpad co-founder Louis Jonckheere, and serial entrepreneur Thomas Van Overbeke. The funds NewSchool, RDY, and 100IN also participated.
“Code today is written faster than ever, often with the help of AI. But whether the product actually works the way users expect is a different story. Holmes covers that exact gap: not whether the code is right, but whether the product holds up in real use,” says Robin Praet, co-founder of Holmes.
Holmes was founded by three Belgian tech entrepreneurs with successful exit experience: Robin Praet, Robbrecht Delrue and Sofie Buyse. Praet and Delrue were co-founders of Smartendr, an ordering solution for the hospitality industry, which OrderBilly acquired in September 2025. Buyse was Henchman’s first hire, an AI tool for legal professionals, which LexisNexis acquired for €136.1 million ($160 million) in June 2024.
Holmes is an autonomous quality assurance (QA) platform that learns how people use a product, tests those flows continuously, and runs inside the tools development teams already use. The company is built for teams shipping at AI speed, and claims that it catches problems before they reach users.
“No software company builds a large QA team from day one. But every company eventually reaches the moment when manual testing starts holding back their growth. That’s the moment we built Holmes for,” said Robbrecht Delrue, co-founder of Holmes.
According to the company, the QA process has become a bottleneck. Engineers manually write and maintain tests, while QA testers click through products to check that everything still works. AI tools like Claude and Codex already help developers write code faster, but what looks correct in the code can still cause problems in a real-world environment, Holmes states. This results in teams having to choose between sacrificing the speed provided by AI or letting bugs slip through the cracks.
Holmes notes that it works differently from traditional testing tools. Rather than relying on engineers to manually write and update tests, Holmes learns how a product works and how people use it. Based on that, the platform understands the full journey a user takes through the product, from start to finish, and creates tests that automatically and continuously verify those journeys, even as the product changes.
The company evaluates the user-facing flows of the web application, including sign-up, login, checkout, search, navigation, forms, and more. Five specialised AI agents handle happy paths, edge cases, responsive layouts, accessibility, and error recovery.
“At Henchman, I ran into it myself: QA is work everybody knows is critical, but nobody wants to own. Skilled QA testers are hard to find and expensive to hire, so testing usually falls on product managers and developers, on top of everything else they’re already doing. And when they lose focus for even a moment, those bugs end up in front of users. That’s why we built Holmes: it takes testing off their plate and runs it continuously in the background, so the team can keep building without worry,” says Sofie Buyse, product manager at Holmes.
The company works with a group of tech leaders who advise the team on product development, including Dieter Wachters (Senior Director of Engineering, Collibra), Haroen Vermylen (co-founder and CTO, Luzmo), Jaap Vergote (co-founder, Upsellplus), and Ivo Minjauw (CPO, Lighthouse).
Holmes is also working with 30 design partners, shaping the product, with broader access rolling out in the coming months.
Read the orginal article: https://www.eu-startups.com/2026/05/belgiums-holmes-launches-with-e1-1-million-pre-seed-to-catch-software-bugs-before-they-reach-users/
