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Canary

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The first AI QA engineer that understands your code

Winter 2026Founded 20262 peopleSan Francisco, CA, USA
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AI insightcan contain mistakes
AI QA TestingSaaSEngineering teams, SaaS companies, software dev shopsHigh competition
Moat
Codebase-aware testing; developer intent understanding; integration with CI/CD pipelines; strong team pedigree (Windsurf, Cognition).
Key risk
Incumbents (TestRail, BrowserStack) may add AI; 90%+ coverage claim requires validation; false positive rates critical.
Why now
AI incident rates rising; traditional QA automation failing at complexity; code-aware AI now feasible.
Competitors
Katalon, TestRail, BrowserStack, Sauce Labs, Applitools

About

AI coding tools have made developers 100x faster but customer-facing incidents are up 43% YoY, QA hasn't kept up. Canary is the first AI QA engineer that understands your codebase. Instead of relying on flaky DOM scraping or screenshot analysis, Canary reads your source code directly to understand developer intent and catch broken user flows before they hit production. Engineering teams go from weeks of manual testing to 90%+ coverage in days. Built by a team that built coding agents at Windsurf, Cognition and Google.

Founders ยท 2

Aakash Mahalingam
Aakash MahalingamFounder

Building Canary: The first AI QA engineer that understands code. Previously built Windsurf's enterprise product, worked on Applied AI tooling around foundational models for enterprises. Launched the enterprise self-serve plan to $20M ARR in 6 months. ICPC APAC finalist.

Viswesh N G
Viswesh N GFounder
Google

Co-founding Canary with a team of ex-Windsurf, Cognition and Google engineers. Canary is the first AI QA engineer that understands your codebase. AI coding tools have made developers 100x faster, but QA hasn't kept up. Unlike tools that rely on flaky DOM scraping, screenshot analysis or vision based models, Canary reads your source code directly to understand developer intent and catch what others miss. We help engineering teams go from weeks of manual testing to 90%+ test coverage in days.

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