Holmes banked €1.1M in Pre-Seed funding led by Syndicate One. The round saw significant participation from prominent angel investors in the Belgian ecosystem, including Willem Delbare and Roel Naessens of Aikido Security, alongside Felix Van de Maele, Wouter De Ranter, Arto Horner, and Niels Van Duyte.
The Ghent-based startup develops an autonomous quality assurance (QA) platform designed specifically for software engineering teams. As developers increasingly use AI to generate code at high volumes, Holmes provides an automated layer to find and fix bugs, ensuring that the velocity of AI-driven development does not compromise codebase stability. The platform acts as an "AI agent" for testing, aiming to replace manual QA bottlenecks.
The investment reflects a growing trend of "second-order" AI startups in Europe: companies built to manage the output and risks of the underlying legislative and technical shifts caused by large language models. The involvement of the Aikido founders is particularly notable, given their recent success in the developer security space.
This raise signals continued investor confidence in Belgium's maturing B2B software hub, where experienced founders are increasingly reinvesting in early-stage local talent to tackle infrastructure challenges in the modern development stack.
Originally reported by Tech Funding News.