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 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 platform’s ‘self-healing’ scripts are designed to automatically adapt when a user interface changes, which the company claims can reduce test maintenance and execution time by up to 90% [Thunders.ai blog, November 2025].
A team built for a second swing
Investors are betting on the founders as much as the product. Jouini and Othmani built Expensya from Tunis into a global expense management platform before its acquisition by Medius [TechCrunch, June 2025]. Their track record provided immediate credibility, helping Thunders secure its seed round from regional heavyweights like Silicon Badia and Janngo Capital [TechCrunch, June 2025]. The company has also been selected for STATION F’s Future 40 program [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
Thunders enters a market already populated by well-funded incumbents like Mabl, Testim, and Functionize. 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].
- Feature parity. The platform must match the depth of integrations and testing environments that established players offer.
- The healing ceiling. The real-world efficacy of its self-healing against complex, dynamic applications will be the ultimate test.
- Sales motion. Scaling a direct sales team for a product that may start as a bottom-up 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 renewal rates and expansion within accounts.