ManaMind Secures $1.5 Million to Build the Autonomous Testing Layer for Gaming
Building the first fully autonomous, agentic AI system for game testing across the $250 billion global games industry
London, UK - 30 April 2026: ManaMind, the autonomous game testing company, has closed a $1.5 million pre-seed round led by AI specialist VC SVV (Sure Valley Ventures), with participation from EWOR, Ascension, Syndicate Room, and Heartfelt. The company is transforming game testing by replacing repetitive manual Quality Assurance (QA) with autonomous AI agents.
QA 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 growing exponentially, making the traditional model unsustainable for game studios.
ManaMind's autonomous AI agents play through games and identify bugs that human testers often miss. The system generates actionable reports, freeing teams to focus on fixing rather than documenting issues. The platform runs continuous testing 24/7 alongside development - not after it. Early deployments demonstrate the impact: full regression cycles completed in 6 hours rather than days, with 86% of critical bugs caught before shipping.
ManaMind has secured design partnerships with Included Games, a mobile games studio, and Crazy Labs, a leading hypercasual developer. The partnerships validate both the technical capability and market demand for AI-native QA infrastructure in the $250 billion global games industry. ManaMind will use the funding to expand its technical team, accelerate proprietary model development, and scale across key geographies.
Emil Kostadinov, CEO and Co-Founder of ManaMind, said: "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."
Brian Kinane, Founding Partner at SVV, commented: "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."
The need for autonomous QA has never been more urgent. Modern AAA titles now ship with 1000+ hours of content across multiple platforms, yet release windows continue to compress. Live-service games demand weekly updates that must be regression-tested continuously. Meanwhile, social media has amplified the cost of buggy launches for studios - Cyberpunk 2077's troubled release initially wiped $1 billion from CD Projekt's market cap in days. Traditional QA simply cannot scale to meet these demands.
The company was founded by Emil Kostadinov, an Oxford MBA and EWOR Fellow who experienced the pain of manual QA firsthand as a game tester, and Sabtain Ahmad, who holds a PhD in Machine Learning. While gaming is ManaMind's entry market, the founding team's long-term vision is to become an autonomous testing layer for longer-term applications beyond gaming.
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About ManaMind
ManaMind’s vision is to bringing Sci-Fi into reality by developing the core technology that will power robots in understanding the world around them and executing any task. Their AI agents perceive their environment through audio and video, just like humans do, allowing them to autonomously play and test video games - one of the most complex interactive environments in existence. By starting with gaming QA, one of the hardest automation challenges in industry, ManaMind is optimising its proprietary model, HiveMind, and building the foundation for a future where intelligent agents can act autonomously across both digital and physical worlds.
