EVERY SPOKEN WORD
35 min read · 6,938 words- HTHarj Taggar
[upbeat music] Hey, everyone. Uh, I'm excited to be joined here today by Weiwei and Jeff. They're the co-founders of Momentic. Uh, Momentic went through YC in winter 2024, and just raised their $50 million Series A round. Weiwei and Jeff, why don't you tell us what Momentic does?
- WWWeiwei Wu
Yeah. You know, Momentic is the verification layer for software. You know, we, we power awesome companies like Notion, Built, Quora, Xero, and you know, we're processing over a million test runs a day.
- HTHarj Taggar
And you just raised $50 million in your Series A from Standard Capital. Uh, te- maybe tell us a bit about why did you raise the round now?
- WWWeiwei Wu
Yeah, yeah. So, so for us, we were at a place where we had a s- you know, repeatable sales motion and, you know, we wanted to raise to scale, you know, both our engineering and go-to-market team so we could build more and, you know, you know, s- uh, get more customers.
- HTHarj Taggar
Uh, and then why Standard Capital? Why'd you choose them as your lead?
- WWWeiwei Wu
Yeah, yeah. For, for us, like, the decision came down w- was pretty simple. You know, Standard was a very quick process. You know, uh, we were... You know, we applied through online. You know, very s- you know, uh, not, not too unlike, you know, the application for YC. And I think the, one of the big standouts for us is, like, you know, instead of having a, you know, board member on our board, we have a peer group of other similar stage, you know, Series A companies to, you know, do our board meetings with. You know, we're, you know, it's a peer group where we're learning and, you know, t- helping each other.
- HTHarj Taggar
For people who aren't technical maybe, who aren't developers, um, explain sort of wha- what testing even is, and then what does Momentic actually do for developers?
- WWWeiwei Wu
Mm-hmm. Yeah, yeah, for sure. So the, you know, the, the quick 101 on testing is that, you know, if I'm shipping code, how do I make sure my app isn't broken? And, you know, especially as my app is getting larger and larger, you know, there's multiple people, multiple teams working on it, there's different product lines. And, um, how do I make sure it's not broken? And testing is, you know, the solution to that. You know, you, you have teams manually testing, which is incredibly efficient, and, you know, you have teams also, you know, dipping their toes into automations. Like, how do we make this process faster, more efficient, without taking as much, you know, valuable engineering time? H- And... But the, the end goal is always, like, how do I make sure my product is working as I expect?
- HTHarj Taggar
One thing that developers are known for traditionally is not wanting to write tests-
- WWWeiwei Wu
[laughs]
- HTHarj Taggar
... not enjoying testing. Like, is that true for both of you in your careers as engineers? And sort of, if so, like, why? Why has there always been this reluctance to write tests?
- JAJeff An
Yeah, I think so. Um, when I was at Robinhood, I, I saw the team grow from 300 engineers to over 1,000, and my entire job was basically, uh, managing eight people and trying to get those eight people to convince the other thousand people to write and maintain tests. Uh, and our goal was to cover 80% of the code that we wrote, uh, and maintain a 90% pass rate. And it was basically impossible to do that. Basically, like, no one cared about this. And I think it just boils down to the fact that it doesn't feel like productive work. Like, it's not work that your customer sees. It's not work that you get to show someone in, like, a flashy demo. Uh, it's not work that, like, shows up on your performance evaluation, right? Uh, and so because of that, it always feels like a drag, like a secondary afterthought. Um, and that's when, you know, there's really a risk to quality and reliability.
- HTHarj Taggar
Now, as we're entering this era of code gen, there's, like... It, it's so fast-moving. Like, one, one day it's Cursor, the next day it's Claude Code, um, maybe the next day it's Codex. [laughs] Um, one thing that's clearly staying constant is just, like, the amount of code, like, lines of code being written per day is growing exponentially. Um, how is that going to impact the need for Momentic and testing? Like, where do you, where have you seen that affect your business?
- WWWeiwei Wu
Yeah, for sure. I think, um, as the amount of code output is increasing, we see massive bottlenecks, you know, where there may, may not be before in terms of just, like, how do I actually verify the work? You know, there's, you know, you have linters, you have code review, but then how do you actually make sure this works when this is deployed to production?
- HTHarj Taggar
E- explain, explain for people who aren't, like, um, engineers themselves kind of what, conceptually, what are linters-
- WWWeiwei Wu
Mm-hmm
- HTHarj Taggar
... and, and what's code review, and how do the- how does that fit in under the umbrella of, of testing and, and shipping code?
- WWWeiwei Wu
Yeah, yeah. So, um, I think, you know, when you're shipping a high volume of code, there's certain tools you can use to, you know, verify that, you know, the code follows good patterns. Like, you can have linters that, you know, scans through your code, make sure you're using the, you know, following the right patterns, you know, following the right best practices. You can also have a code review where, you know, it's, it can be human, another engineer review your code that you're about to merge, or, you know, recently there's been a lot of AI code reviewers where, you know, help- helping to take some of that burden off of humans. And I think an important part that Momentic solves is beyond all these different checks that you already have today, how do you actually make sure it's actually working live? And, you know, the, the status quo, you know, for a lot of teams is, you know, I'm gonna go in as a human and log in and manually click around and do, like, a bug bash be- every time before a release. And that's just not scalable when you, you know, your product is growing, you have a lot of engineers, and it's also, you know, it's just very slow and very expensive.
- HTHarj Taggar
And so then where exactly does Momentic fit into that flow? Like, you know, you have engineers writing the code, you have linters looking for, like, you know, does it conform to the right patterns or not, you have humans reviewing code. Where does Momentic fit in there?
- WWWeiwei Wu
Yeah. So, uh, the, the type of testing that Momentic does is, uh, what we call a functional testing. It's acting, impersonating one of your users, actually going through your app and, you know, uh, clicking through and, you know, uh, making sure all of the user flows, uh, that I can achieve is actually working. And how we fit in is, you know, as an engineer makes a code change, you know, their change is gonna impact production in some way. We just make sure that-
- JAJeff An
Everything that they care about doesn't break, um, you know, from a end user's perspective.
- HTHarj Taggar
How should engineers think about where you fit into the dev stack? Like I've, I've certainly noticed this on our own engineering team at YC, like, as Claude Code usage has ramped up, um, we've now set up sort of pipeline. Like, it's in the Claude MD file actually to just, like, make sure you, like, run your own tests and, like, make sure they all pass before you, like, submit any, um, uh, PRs or MRs. Like, where should someone... Where is an engineer who currently doesn't have Momentic in their, like, in that dev stack, where should they think about inserting you?
- JAJeff An
Yeah. So I think there's a couple places. Um, one is within your developer loop. We are seeing a lot of customers actually use our MCP integration to have a cursor or Claude Code, uh, write and run Momentic tests while they're developing. So actually, while they're creating a new feature or editing an existing feature, they'll, you know, make sure that these coding agents also verify that that change, uh, is functionally correct, uh, by calling out to Momentic, starting a real browser, verifying that the flow actually works.
- HTHarj Taggar
So like a tool... It's basically a tool call for one of the agents to like-
- JAJeff An
Right. Yeah
- HTHarj Taggar
... and, and so and why is that better than the agent just sort of writing its own tests from scratch?
- JAJeff An
Yeah. Yeah. So one thing that we've seen is, like, first of all, the agent often thinks that it doesn't have to do that, or whatever it's done is just correct, uh, even though it's not. Uh, and secondly, these agents aren't optimized, uh, for browser use, especially in a testing capacity. Uh, so, uh, some of our customers, they have incredibly complex sites, um, that are actually incredibly hard to interact with, right? Like rich text editors, drag and drop editors, uh, things that have, like, canvases, right? And these types of applications are just, uh, relatively difficult to verify, um, but we've specialized our agents to deal with that.
- HTHarj Taggar
It's also really slow. Like, I've used this for just, like, side projects where you, you have the, like, Claude Code browser extension, and you can tell Claude Code to, like, use the browser extension to, like-
- JAJeff An
Right
- HTHarj Taggar
... figure out what's going on with this bug, but it's just, like, so slow. Um-
Episode duration: 33:54
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