Spur Raises Millions to Automate Website Testing with AI

Two bold AI startups are making waves. One defies tradition while the other rewrites the rules. Cluely, created by a suspended Columbia student, challenges hiring norms. Spur, founded by Yale graduates, simplifies website testing. Both raised millions, proving that disruption still attracts serious backing.

Two Yale graduates, Sneha Sivakumar and Anushka Nijhawan, have secured $4.5 million in seed funding for their startup, Spur, which aims to transform how websites are tested for bugs. The round was led by Liz Wessel of First Round Capital, with participation from Pear VC, Neo, Conviction, and angel investors from Figma, Dropbox, and Rippling.

The announcement was shared on X with a snapshot of Spur's funding details and investor lineup:

Founded in 2024, Spur allows users to run software tests using everyday language. For example, users can instruct the system to “add a product to the cart” or “submit a job application,” and Spur’s agent will test those website functions automatically, offering feedback or debugging support.

“A lot of the other agents were not advanced enough,” said Sivakumar. “We were at the bleeding edge of what we were doing.”

The idea was born out of their final year at Yale, blending Sivakumar’s experience with manual QA at Figma and Nijhawan’s work on AI agents at DeepMind. They created a synthetic user capable of mimicking how people interact with websites—without the need for engineers to manually conduct time-consuming quality checks.

“We still use the original agent and computer we built in college,” Sivakumar added.

Spur recently shared a behind-the-scenes look at their tool in action, highlighting how it helps customers catch bugs before they reach end users:

Spur joined Y Combinator’s Summer 2024 batch and has since gained traction within the startup community. Notably, Y Combinator itself is now a client.

The founders credit their success to a combination of technical skill and strong networking.

“It is all about putting yourself out there,” Sivakumar said. She also emphasized the importance of co-founding with someone you trust. “Doing this as a solo founder would have been very difficult.”

With growing interest in AI-driven automation, Spur is positioning itself as a practical solution for scaling software testing—offering developers faster and more efficient tools to catch bugs before users do.