Overview
Holmes was founded in 2026 by Robin Praet, Robbrecht Delrue, and Sofie Buyse, three Belgian operators each with a prior exit. The team builds an autonomous software-testing platform aimed at engineering teams shipping AI-generated code at high velocity. Rather than asking developers to hand-write and maintain test suites, Holmes observes how a product is actually used, infers the end-to-end journeys that matter, and turns those into self-updating tests inside the CI/CD pipeline.
The platform deploys a set of specialised AI agents covering happy paths, edge cases, responsive layouts, accessibility, and error recovery. The founders position Holmes around a structural shift: traditional QA workflows cannot keep pace with AI-assisted development, so testing itself has to become autonomous. At launch the company was working with 30 design partners, with broader access rolling out in 2026.
The founder credentials anchor the pitch. Praet and Delrue previously co-founded Smartendr, a hospitality ordering platform that grew to 600+ venues and 400,000+ monthly users before being acquired by OrderBilly in September 2025. Delrue had earlier scaled go-to-market at Teamleader. Buyse was the first hire at Henchman, the Ghent legal AI tool acquired by LexisNexis for EUR 136.1M in June 2024.
In May 2026 Holmes announced a EUR 1.1M pre-Seed round led by Syndicate One, with participation from Roeland Delrue and Willem Delbare (co-founders of Aikido Security), Louis Jonckheere (co-founder of Showpad), serial entrepreneur Thomas Van Overbeke, and funds NewSchool.vc, RDY Capital, and 100IN. The advisory bench includes engineering leaders from Collibra, Luzmo, Upsellplus, and Lighthouse.
Funding history
- Pre-Seed: EUR 1.1M (May 2026), led by Syndicate One, with NewSchool.vc, RDY Capital, 100IN, and angels Roeland Delrue, Willem Delbare (Aikido Security), Louis Jonckheere (Showpad), Thomas Van Overbeke.
Key people
In the news
- 𝗪𝗲 𝗿𝗮𝗶𝘀𝗲𝗱 €𝟭.𝟭𝗠 𝗲𝗮𝗿𝗹𝗶𝗲𝗿 𝘁𝗵𝗶𝘀 𝘆𝗲𝗮𝗿. Sorry to whoever already published the Q2 funding numbers. Led by JK INVEST, with imec.istart, ⚡ Super Capital ⚡ and a group of exceptional business angels. Sixteen years in finance and one thing still makes no sense to me. The business changes every day. Finance finds out last. Finance still has to explain it. Most tools just help you build and update your forecast faster. But they still wait for the numbers. Four days or four minutes. Who cares. 👀 Enter Peaky. We
- A while ago it was just a beer and a crazy idea. And earlier this year we closed our €𝟭.𝟭𝗠 𝗳𝘂𝗻𝗱𝗶𝗻𝗴 𝗿𝗼𝘂𝗻𝗱 with Peaky. What a ride. 🤩 I come from design, not finance. But you don't need a finance background to see that something is broken when the people running a business are always the last to know what's happening in it. Peaky fixes that. A living financial plan that moves with your business and tells you what's changing before it costs you. Oh, and we were named Belgium's Best FinTech Startup of the Year. Still
- Driving at 120 km/h while looking exclusively in the rearview mirror sounds like a terrible idea, yet that’s how most companies still run their business. Traditional tools only tell you about the wall three weeks after you’ve hit it. Turns out, people prefer seeing the road ahead. Enter Peaky. We just raised €1.1M to build the future of financial planning, and we’re ready to accelerate well beyond 120 km/h. Thanks to our customers and early pilots for their trust. Aikido Security, Tout Bien Pils, ProPlanner, Holmes, The Harbour,
- Ten months ago Azzurri Group's CEO Steve Holmes said ASK Italian and Zizzi Restaurants would "strengthen their leading positions." Some ASK sites are becoming Dave's Hot Chicken. The easy read is that Italian casual dining lost to fried chicken. I don't think that's what happened. ASK didn't lose to Dave's. Where ASK and Zizzi sit close together, Azzurri has decided one of them goes. Same owner. Same catchment. In Oxford, the same street. CEO Steve Holmes says those sites were profitable. I believe him. That's the problem: profitable
- Please welcome Thor Dossche to the Holmes engineering team! ⚡ After spending a good part of this year travelling and surfing through South America, Thor has landed at Holmes for his next adventure, ready to catch the AI wave with us. 🏄 Together, we’ll work towards a future where software tests itself, helping engineering teams ship faster and with confidence. We’re excited to have you with us, Thor. Welcome aboard! 💚
- New case just dropped. 🕵️♂️ We’re looking for a Founding AI Engineer to help us build the future of software testing. The clues: 📍 Ghent 🚀 Day-one ownership 🌍 Global ambition 🤖 A lot of interesting AI problems to solve 💎 Equity If this sounds suspiciously like you, we should talk.
- Our devs ship features in 3 days that used to take 3 weeks. But testing still takes just as long." A CTO told us this a couple weeks ago, and it's stuck with us. Devs are shipping with Cursor or Claude Code at speeds nobody planned for. QA is still mostly manual: clicking through flows before every release, patching flaky Playwright tests, never quite trusting the regression suite. AI writes the scripts now, but scripts are still scripts. They break the moment the UI shifts, because they were never testing intent, they were testing
- Please welcome Sébastien Colle to the Holmes sales team! He, Robin Praet & Robbrecht Delrue go way back, from their Lightspeed and Smartendr days. He speaks Dutch, French and even some Arabic, and somehow also owns a couple of riads in Marrakech (we already know where the next team offsite will be 😏). Fun fact: "colle" means glue in West-Flemish. So the name checks out, consider him the glue holding our deal flow together. Welcome aboard, Colle 💚
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