Karim Jouini and Jihed Othmani sold their last company, Expensya, for over $100 million in one of the MENA region’s largest exits [STATION F Future 40 announcement, 2025]. They could have retired. Instead, they spent ten months building an AI tool to fix one of software’s most tedious chores: writing and maintaining test scripts. Their new company, Thunders, just raised a $9 million seed round to see if natural language and self-healing code can finally make test automation feel less like a tax [TechCrunch, June 2025].
The bet on no-code maintenance
The core pitch is straightforward. Instead of writing brittle, code-based tests, a user describes what they want to test in plain English. Thunders’ generative AI agents then build and execute the corresponding test flows [Thunders.ai, 2025]. The more interesting trick is what happens next. The platform’s ‘self-healing’ scripts are designed to automatically adapt when a user interface changes,a button moves, a label is updated,which the company claims can reduce test maintenance and execution time by up to 90% [Thunders.ai blog, November 2025]. For a development team, the unit economics are intuitive: less engineer hours burned on test upkeep means more hours for building features.
A team built for a second swing
Investors are betting on the founders as much as the product. Jouini and Othmani are not first-timers navigating enterprise sales; they built Expensya from Tunis into a global expense management platform before its acquisition by Medius [TechCrunch, June 2025]. Their track record of scaling a B2B SaaS company from the region provided immediate credibility, helping Thunders secure its substantial seed round from regional heavyweights like Silicon Badia and Janngo Capital within months of founding [TechCrunch, June 2025]. The company has also been selected for STATION F’s Future 40 program in Paris, a signal of its ambition to play on a European stage [Thunders.ai blog, November 2025].
| Founder | Role | Key Background |
|---|---|---|
| Karim Jouini | CEO | Co-founded Expensya (acquired by Medius), former Microsoft engineer, Forbes Technology Council member [Forbes, 2025]. |
| Jihed Othmani | CTO | Co-founded Expensya, led its technical development [Jihed Othmani LinkedIn profile, 2026]. |
The crowded field of AI test automation
The ambition is clear, but the path is well-trodden. Thunders enters a market already populated by well-funded incumbents like Mabl, Testim, and Functionize, all promising some version of intelligent, low-maintenance testing. The differentiation will need to be more than semantic. Jouini has written about the practical realities of AI adoption, suggesting a focus on tangible productivity gains over hype [Forbes, May 2025]. For Thunders, proving those gains means moving beyond the blog-post claim of “paying clients” to publicly named deployments where the 90% time-savings argument can be scrutinized [Thunders.ai blog, November 2025]. The risks here are not novel, but they are specific.
- Feature parity. The platform must quickly match the depth of integrations and testing environments (web, mobile, API) that established players offer.
- The healing ceiling. The promise of 90% reduced maintenance is a high bar; the real-world efficacy of its self-healing against complex, dynamic applications will be the ultimate test.
- Sales motion. While the founders have enterprise experience, selling a developer tool requires a different muscle than selling finance software. Scaling a direct sales team for a product that may start as a bottom-up, team-level purchase is a fresh challenge.
The next twelve months
The seed capital provides a long runway to iterate. The immediate focus will be on proving product-market fit with concrete customer case studies and expanding the platform’s capabilities, with mobile and desktop testing explicitly on the 2025 roadmap [Thunders.ai blog, November 2025]. The real metric to watch is not just revenue, but renewal rates and expansion within accounts,signals that the promised maintenance savings are real and sticky.
Do the math on that 90% claim. If a mid-size engineering team currently spends 40 person-hours a week maintaining test suites, Thunders is proposing to shrink that to 4 hours. The freed capacity, priced at a blended engineer rate, quickly justifies a five-figure annual SaaS spend. That’s the calculation every QA lead will make. To win, Thunders must consistently deliver that outcome more reliably than Mabl, the incumbent that has been refining its own AI-powered, self-healing tests for years.
Sources
- [TechCrunch, June 2025] One of Africa's most successful founders is back with a new AI startup and already raised $9M | https://techcrunch.com/2025/06/03/one-of-africas-most-successful-founders-is-back-with-a-new-ai-startup-and-already-raised-9m/
- [Thunders.ai blog, November 2025] Thunders: the AI testing revolution joins STATION F's Future 40 | https://www.thunders.ai/articles/thunders-the-ai-testing-revolution-joins-station-fs-future-40
- [Thunders.ai, 2025] AI Test Automation Tool for all Teams | Thunders | https://www.thunders.ai
- [STATION F Future 40 announcement, 2025] Thunders selected for STATION F Future 40 program | https://www.thunders.ai/articles/thunders-the-ai-testing-revolution-joins-station-fs-future-40
- [Forbes, May 2025] Council Post: The Reality Of AI Adoption: A Founder's Perspective | https://www.forbes.com/councils/forbestechcouncil/2025/05/05/the-reality-of-ai-adoption-a-founders-perspective/
- [Jihed Othmani LinkedIn profile, 2026] Jihed Othmani - CTO Thunders.ai | https://www.linkedin.com/in/jihedo/