A letter to our users, customers and readers

Dear friend,

This is one of the hardest notes we've ever had to write, so we're going to keep it honest. We've decided to close Octomind. The company will wind down by the end of June, and our product will be turned off at the end of May.

We poured our hearts, our souls, and far too many coffees and soft drinks into this. We built something we were proud of with people we loved working with. And we still believe, deeply, that the problem we set out to solve: giving developers a faster, saner way to test their applications; is real, and only getting more urgent as AI coding agents write more of the software the world runs on.

In the end, we didn't find the market validation we needed to keep going. That's not anyone's fault. It's part of being at a startup, and part of why we did this in the first place: to try something hard, with no guarantee. We're sad about how it ended, but we're not sorry we tried.

Thank you — seriously

To everyone who gave Octomind a try — thank you. You signed up, you ran a test suite, you kicked the tyres, you sent us feedback (some of it very pointed, which we also appreciated). Every one of those sessions taught us something.

To our customers — thank you for the trust. You put a piece of your release process into our hands, and you stuck with us through rough edges, bugs, and the occasional incident. We know how much trust that takes. Working with you was the best part of this job.

To everyone who followed along on the blog — thank you for reading. For sharing the posts, for arguing with us in the comments, for the emails that started with "I don't usually write to strangers on the internet, but…". Writing for a real audience is a gift, and you were ours.

To our investors

To Cherry Ventures who led our seed, and to every angel who put money, time and a reputation behind us — thank you. You backed us when this was just a pitch and two founders. You gave us room to try, and grace when things got hard. The outcome isn't the one any of us wanted, but your trust is something we'll carry with us.

To the Octoneers who came before

Octomind was never just the people here at the end. A lot of people showed up, shipped real things, and shaped what this company became — and then moved on to their own next chapters. This letter is from all of us, not just the ones still at the desks. Thank you for everything you built, everything you argued for, and every bit of the culture you left behind.

• Maike Burkard — Senior Agile Coach
• Dániel Zoltan Aczél — Lead Designer
• Maria Zahorcova — CMO
• Fabian Both — Staff AI Engineer
• Konstantin "Kosta" Welke — #1 Code Monkey (his own title choice!)
• Siniša Stanic — Engineer and Top Memer
• Anikó Biró — Senior UX Designer & Researcher
• Veith Röthlingshöfer — Senior Software Engineer, Deep Learning & Agentic Flows
• Fabio Maienschein — Software Engineer and Resident DJ
• Maximilian Link — Software Engineer

What we still believe

Testing is not a solved problem. It's barely a studied one. And as AI agents write more of the code, the cost of not testing — or of testing badly — is going to grow faster than the productivity gains from generating code in the first place. Someone, somewhere, is going to build the right shape of this. We hope they do.

We learned an enormous amount along the way: about agents, about browsers, about distributed systems, about users, about ourselves. None of that goes away just because the company does. We'll be carrying it into whatever comes next, and we hope some of what we wrote here is still useful to you in yours.

Practical details

• The app will be turned off at the end of May. If you're a customer, we'll be in touch directly to help you export what you need and wind things down cleanly.
• The company will be closed by the end of June.
• [email protected] will stay monitored while we wind down, and octomind.dev — including this blog — will stick around for a while yet. The writing isn't going anywhere.

If we worked with you, wrote with you, argued with you on the internet, or just shared a conference hallway at some point — we are grateful. Genuinely. It mattered.

Take care of yourselves. Keep writing tests.

With love and gratitude,

The Octomind team