Mosaic Ventures of London led a €7.13M seed round for Klarent, a Zurich startup whose software tests other software. Moonfire Ventures took part, along with angel backers that include Jürgen Galler, a former Google director, and Harris Barton.
The two founders, Asheem Panakkat and Momchil Ivanov, are ex-Google engineers who met on Shopping and Lens and on information retrieval. While there, both watched large language models improve quickly and saw the volume of machine-written code start to outrun the tooling meant to check it. Klarent’s approach is deliberately narrow: the agents call on large language models only to author test code, and that code then runs in a deterministic way, giving the same result every time. Buyers pay only for confirmed outcomes thanks to a verification layer that keeps a person in the loop. Chandar Lal, a Mosaic Ventures partner, said this commitment to determinism is what persuaded his firm.
European enterprises are already on board, among them the mobility company Sixt, the Swiss media group NZZ and JD Sports. Across the e-commerce pipeline, the retailer’s multi-system workflows are handled by Klarent’s agents, a job its in-house teams could not reproduce, according to the company.
Why it matters: as models write more production code, checking that code becomes both the bottleneck and the budget line. Klarent sells trust in the output rather than the output itself, a position that is harder for model makers to undercut.
