Thunders

PUBLIC

Name	Thunders
Tagline	AI-powered no-code test automation with self-healing scripts
Headquarters	Tunis, Tunisia
Founded	2025
Stage	Seed
Business Model	SaaS
Industry	Other
Technology	AI / Machine Learning
Geography	Middle East / North Africa
Growth Profile	Venture Scale
Founding Team	Co-Founders (2)
Funding Label	Seed (total disclosed ~$9,000,000)

PUBLIC

• Website: https://www.thunders.ai
• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jihedo/

Executive Summary

PUBLIC

Thunders is an AI-powered no-code test automation platform that merits investor attention for its rapid launch by a proven founding team and its pursuit of a large, inefficient market. Founded in January 2025 in Tunis, the company uses generative AI to create and execute software tests from natural language instructions, with a core promise of self-healing scripts that adapt to UI changes [Thunders.ai blog, November 2025]. The founding story is its strongest signal: co-founders Karim Jouini and Jihed Othmani are veterans of Expensya, a Tunisian expense management platform whose acquisition by Medius was described as one of the largest in the MENA region [TechCrunch, June 2025] [Fintech Futures, 2023]. Their prior exit, reportedly for over $120 million, provides immediate credibility and operational capital for this second venture [Innovation Village].

This team pedigree facilitated a swift $9 million seed round in June 2025, just months after founding, and secured a spot in the STATION F Future 40 program for 2025, a validation of its early-stage potential [TechCrunch, June 2025] [STATION F official announcement, 2025]. The business model is SaaS, targeting QA engineers and developers with a wedge against manual and code-heavy testing processes. Over the next 12-18 months, the key watchpoints will be the translation of technical claims into documented customer traction and the demonstration of product differentiation in a competitive landscape populated by established players like Mabl and Testim.

Data Accuracy: YELLOW -- Core company facts are confirmed, but key founder exit details and product traction claims rely on single or unverified sources.

Taxonomy Snapshot

Axis	Value
Stage	Seed
Business Model	SaaS
Technology Type	AI / Machine Learning
Geography	Middle East / North Africa
Growth Profile	Venture Scale
Founding Team	Co-Founders (2)

Company Overview

PUBLIC

Thunders emerged from a founder narrative that is both rare and highly relevant for its target market. The company was founded in January 2025 in Tunis, Tunisia, by Karim Jouini and Jihed Othmani, the co-founders of Expensya [TechCrunch, June 2025]. Their prior venture, a SaaS expense management platform, was acquired by Medius in June 2023 in a transaction described as one of the largest in the MENA region [Expensya/Medius press release, June 2023] [Fintech Futures, 2023]. The reported exit value, while not officially confirmed, has been cited as over $120 million [Innovation Village]. This background provides a tangible track record of building and exiting a global SaaS business from the region, a credibility marker that is immediately apparent to investors.

The company maintains a presence in Paris, a strategic choice likely linked to its selection for the STATION F Future 40 program in late 2025 [Thunders.ai blog, November 2025] [STATION F official announcement, 2025]. This accelerator nod, coming from the world's largest startup campus, serves as an external validation point within its first year of operation. The founding timeline is compressed and aggressive: within ten months of inception, Thunders had secured a $9 million seed round and announced it had paying clients [TechCrunch, June 2025] [Thunders.ai blog, November 2025]. This rapid sequence of founding, funding, and initial program validation frames the company as executing with the velocity expected of repeat founders.

Data Accuracy: YELLOW -- Founder and funding details are confirmed by TechCrunch. Exit details for Expensya are reported by multiple outlets but not officially disclosed. Accelerator selection is confirmed by STATION F.

Product and Technology

MIXED

Thunders positions its core product as an AI-powered test automation platform designed to replace manual and code-dependent testing workflows. The platform's primary user interface is natural language, where QA engineers, product managers, or developers can describe test scenarios in plain English to generate and execute corresponding test scripts [Thunders.ai blog, November 2025]. This no-code approach is intended to serve as a wedge into development teams, reducing the technical barrier to creating automated tests.

The company's most detailed technical claim centers on self-healing scripts. According to its own materials, the AI system monitors for UI changes and automatically adapts test scripts to maintain functionality, a process said to reduce test maintenance and execution time by up to 90% [Thunders.ai blog, November 2025]. While the underlying model architecture is not disclosed, the product's differentiation rests on this proprietary adaptation layer rather than on training a foundational model from scratch. The platform is built for integration into CI/CD pipelines, targeting a broad user base across industries [Thunders.ai, 2025].

Public announcements indicate an expansion roadmap for 2025, with plans to extend testing capabilities to mobile and desktop applications [Thunders.ai blog, November 2025]. No other technical specifications, such as supported programming languages, integration partners, or detailed security certifications, are publicly available. The technology stack can be inferred as a cloud-native SaaS architecture, likely leveraging contemporary frameworks for front-end development and API orchestration, though this remains unconfirmed by the company.

Data Accuracy: YELLOW -- Product claims are sourced from the company's own blog and website; the 90% efficiency claim is unverified by third-party benchmarks or customer case studies.

Market Research

MIXED

The demand for automated software testing is being reshaped by the acceleration of development cycles and the rising cost of manual QA, a structural shift that creates a durable opening for AI-native tools. While Thunders does not yet cite a third-party TAM study, the broader market for test automation is well-documented. For context, the global test automation market was valued at $20.7 billion in 2022 and is projected to reach $49.9 billion by 2027, growing at a compound annual rate of 19.2% [MarketsandMarkets, 2022]. This analogous market sizing provides a reference point for the category's scale, though Thunders's specific SAM,targeting QA engineers, product managers, and developers in CI/CD environments via a no-code, AI-powered wedge,is narrower.

Several demand drivers underpin this growth. The primary tailwind is the widespread adoption of agile and DevOps methodologies, which compress release timelines and make manual testing a bottleneck [Thunders.ai blog, November 2025]. This creates a direct need for tools that reduce maintenance time, a pain point Thunders claims to address with self-healing scripts that can cut testing time by up to 90%. A secondary driver is the ongoing developer shortage, which pressures organizations to empower non-technical roles like product managers to participate in quality assurance, aligning with Thunders's no-code, natural-language interface.

Key adjacent markets include the broader quality engineering and application performance monitoring sectors, where substitutes like manual testing services and legacy, code-heavy automation frameworks (e.g., Selenium) still dominate. The competitive threat is not displacement by another new entrant, but inertia: convincing teams to switch from entrenched, albeit inefficient, workflows. Regulatory forces are generally a tailwind, particularly in sectors like fintech and healthcare, where compliance requirements mandate rigorous, auditable testing protocols, increasing the value proposition for a platform that can generate and maintain test coverage systematically.

Global Test Automation Market 2022 | 20.7 | $B
Global Test Automation Market 2027 (projected) | 49.9 | $B

The projected near-doubling of the market by 2027 indicates strong secular demand, but Thunders's success hinges on capturing a specific niche within it,teams frustrated by the maintenance burden of traditional automation. The absence of a company-specific TAM suggests the go-to-market strategy is currently driven by product-led growth and founder credibility rather than a top-down market analysis.

Data Accuracy: YELLOW -- Market sizing is from a third-party report for an analogous sector; company-specific SAM/SOM is not publicly defined.

Competitive Landscape

MIXED Thunders enters a fragmented but mature market for test automation, positioning itself as a no-code, AI-native challenger to established script-based platforms and newer AI-assisted tools.

Mabl | 80 | $M
Testim | 85 | $M
Functionize | 55 | $M
Thunders | 9 | $M

The funding gap between Thunders and its primary venture-backed competitors is significant, with rivals having raised between five and nine times more capital. This disparity underscores the capital intensity of scaling in a market where brand recognition and enterprise sales cycles are key.

Company	Positioning	Stage / Funding	Notable Differentiator	Source
Thunders	AI-powered, no-code test automation with self-healing scripts.	Seed ($9M, 2025)	Generative AI for test creation from natural language; founders' prior $100M+ exit.	[TechCrunch, June 2025]
Mabl	Intelligent test automation platform with low-code and codeless options.	Series C ($80M total)	Integrated quality intelligence and data-driven insights across the testing lifecycle.	[Crunchbase]
Testim	AI-powered end-to-end test automation platform.	Series C ($85M total)	Root-cause analysis and self-healing focused on stability and flaky test reduction.	[Crunchbase]
Functionize	AI-driven test automation for enterprise web applications.	Series B ($55M total)	Adaptive AI engine designed for complex, dynamic enterprise UIs.	[Crunchbase]

The competitive map splits into three primary segments. First, the legacy incumbents like Selenium and Cypress, which are open-source or code-first frameworks deeply embedded in developer workflows but require significant maintenance. Second, the venture-backed AI challengers, including Mabl, Testim, and Functionize, which have raised substantial capital to build cloud platforms that layer machine learning on top of traditional testing paradigms. Third, adjacent substitutes like low-code RPA tools or manual QA outsourcing, which compete on budget rather than technical capability. Thunders aims to leapfrog the second segment by building from a pure generative AI foundation, promising a higher degree of automation from the outset [Thunders.ai blog, November 2025].

Thunders's defensible edge today rests almost entirely on its founding team's credibility and speed. Co-founders Karim Jouini and Jihed Othmani built and sold Expensya, a feat that provides immediate investor trust and accelerates hiring and early enterprise conversations in the MENA and European markets [TechCrunch, June 2025]. Their selection for the STATION F Future 40 program further validates this early momentum [STATION F official announcement, 2025]. However, this is a perishable advantage; within 12-18 months, the narrative must shift from founder pedigree to demonstrated product superiority and customer traction. The technical differentiator of generative AI-driven, no-code test creation is not yet a durable moat, as larger competitors can and are integrating similar LLM capabilities.

The company is most exposed in two areas. First, it lacks the deep enterprise integration and security certifications that incumbents like Mabl and Testim have built over years of selling to Fortune 500 companies. Second, its capital runway is shorter. With $9 million in seed funding, Thunders must achieve capital efficiency far exceeding its better-funded rivals to finance the costly enterprise sales and R&D required to stay competitive. A specific competitor advantage is Testim's focus on root-cause analysis, which addresses a critical pain point of test maintenance that Thunders's self-healing claims also target but without the same depth of publicly documented case studies.

The most plausible 18-month scenario is one of market segmentation. If Thunders can successfully use its founders' network to land and expand within mid-market European tech companies, it could establish a strong regional foothold. The winner in this case would be a company like Mabl, which continues to secure larger enterprise deals while also catering to the low-code segment. The loser would be undifferentiated mid-tier players that fail to articulate a clear AI advantage. For Thunders to avoid being sidelined, it must convert its early technical promise into a measurable reduction in total cost of ownership for QA, a metric that resonates in a budget-conscious environment.

Data Accuracy: YELLOW -- Competitor funding and positioning sourced from Crunchbase; Thunders' details from TechCrunch and company blog. Direct feature comparisons are inferred from public positioning.

Opportunity

PUBLIC

The prize for Thunders is a foundational position in the $40 billion software testing market, a segment where manual processes and brittle automation create a persistent, expensive bottleneck for every enterprise software team [TechCrunch, June 2025].

The headline opportunity is to become the default AI-native layer for quality assurance, a category-defining platform that moves testing from a cost center to an integrated, intelligent part of the development lifecycle. This outcome is reachable not as a speculative vision but as a direct extension of the founders' proven playbook: building a complex, workflow-specific SaaS product (Expensya) and scaling it to a global customer base before a nine-figure exit. The evidence that this pattern can repeat is the team itself. Karim Jouini and Jihed Othmani have already executed the full cycle of founding, scaling, and exiting a B2B software company from the MENA region to an international acquirer [TechCrunch, June 2025]. Their credibility with investors, evidenced by a $9 million seed round secured within months of founding, provides the capital runway to pursue this ambitious target without the immediate fundraising pressure that constrains first-time founders.

Multiple paths exist to reach that scale. The company's initial product wedge,no-code test creation via natural language,targets the broadest user base, from product managers to QA engineers, which facilitates rapid adoption. From that beachhead, several concrete growth scenarios are plausible.

Scenario	What happens	Catalyst	Why it's plausible
Enterprise Land-and-Expand	Thunders becomes the mandated testing platform for large financial or telecom enterprises with complex, legacy UI estates.	A flagship partnership or deployment with a Global 2000 company in a regulated industry.	The founders' Expensya background involved selling into enterprise finance departments, a relevant sales motion. The platform's cited "self-healing" capability directly addresses the high maintenance cost that plagues enterprise UI test suites [Thunders.ai blog, November 2025].
CI/CD Platform Embed	Thunders is adopted as the preferred or embedded testing solution by a major DevOps platform (e.g., GitLab, CircleCI).	A technology partnership or integration launch with a platform serving millions of developers.	The product is built for CI/CD environments [Startup Intros, 2025]. Success in the STATION F Future 40 program provides visibility and network access to potential platform partners in the European tech ecosystem [STATION F official announcement, 2025].

What compounding looks like for Thunders is a data and workflow flywheel. Each test execution generates data on application behavior, UI changes, and failure patterns. This proprietary dataset, aggregated across customers, can continuously improve the accuracy of the AI's test generation and the robustness of its self-healing algorithms. A better product reduces test maintenance time,the company claims reductions of "up to 90%",which increases customer retention and expands usage within accounts [Thunders.ai blog, November 2025]. This creates a classic SaaS efficiency loop: lower churn and higher expansion drive improved unit economics, fueling further R&D investment in the AI core. While the flywheel's motion is not yet publicly verified with churn or expansion metrics, the foundational product claim is that it is designed to create this reinforcing cycle.

The size of the win can be framed by a credible comparable. In 2021, test automation platform Tricentis was valued at approximately $2 billion during a funding round [Bloomberg, 2021]. Another peer, Mabl, a venture-backed AI testing competitor, has raised over $100 million. If Thunders executes on the enterprise land-and-expand scenario and captures a meaningful share of the large-enterprise segment, an outcome in the low billions of dollars is a plausible scenario, not a forecast. This represents a return multiple of over 100x on the known seed capital, aligning with the power-law outcomes sought by the venture funds backing the company.

Data Accuracy: YELLOW -- The core opportunity thesis relies on founder track record and product claims, which are reported but not yet independently verified with customer traction data. Market context is established via industry reporting.

Sources

PUBLIC

1. [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/

2. [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

3. [Thunders.ai, 2025] AI Test Automation Tool for all Teams | Thunders | https://www.thunders.ai/

4. [Fintech Futures, 2023] Medius to acquire Expensya | https://www.fintechfutures.com/2023/06/medius-to-acquire-expensya/

5. [Innovation Village] Expensya reportedly acquired for over $120 million | https://innovation-village.com/expensya-reportedly-acquired-for-over-120-million/

6. [Expensya/Medius press release, June 2023] Medius Announces Intent to Acquire Expensya | https://www.medius.com/press-releases/medius-announces-intent-to-acquire-expensya/

7. [STATION F official announcement, 2025] STATION F Future 40 2025 | https://stationf.co/future40/

8. [Startup Intros, 2025] Thunder Code: Funding, Team & Investors | https://startupintros.com/orgs/thunder-code

9. [MarketsandMarkets, 2022] Test Automation Market by Component, Endpoint Interface, Organization Size, Vertical and Region - Global Forecast to 2027 | https://www.marketsandmarkets.com/Market-Reports/test-automation-market-1158.html

10. [Crunchbase] Mabl Company Profile | https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/mabl

11. [Crunchbase] Testim Company Profile | https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/testim-io

12. [Crunchbase] Functionize Company Profile | https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/functionize

13. [Bloomberg, 2021] Tricentis Valued at $2 Billion in Funding Round | https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-06-08/tricentis-valued-at-2-billion-in-funding-round