Expensya founders return with Thunder Code, raise $9M to automate software testing with AI

Paris- and Tunis-based Thunder Code has raised $9 million in Seed funding to rethink how software is tested, using AI agents instead of humans.

Founded by Karim Jouini and Jihed Othmani, the team behind Expensya, Thunder Code is their follow-up to one of Africa’s biggest tech exits. Expensya was acquired by Swedish procurement platform Medius in 2023 for a reported $120 million+.

After the deal, Jouini became CTO at Medius, overseeing the integration of six companies across three continents. One pain point stood out everywhere: QA was still slow, manual, and brittle.

Thunder Code replaces that process with autonomous AI agents that test like real users: flagging UI bugs, reviewing specs, simulating flows, and offering product feedback.

The product shipped six weeks in, and the company already has customers and pilots live in the U.S., France, Tunisia, and Canada. Web apps are the starting point; mobile, desktop, and API testing are on the roadmap for 2025.

The $9 million seed round includes Silicon Badia, Janngo Capital, Titan Seed Fund, and angels like Roxanne Varza (Station F) and Karim Beguir (InstaDeep). Early Expensya employees, some of whom invested their own acquisition payouts, have also joined the founding team.

Jouini says they’re applying hard lessons from Expensya’s near-collapse during COVID, when revenue dropped 85% and they were forced to pivot from SMBs to mid-market. That move took the company from $3M to $10M+ ARR and ultimately positioned it for exit.

He breaks down that pivot, and why he thinks SaaS as we know it won’t survive the AI era, in a March 2025 interview with RallyCap’s Kwayne Kassiri, linked below – it’s well worth a listen.