Q3 Tweener Founder Spotlights: MuukTest with Ivan Vargas
How two engineers turned 20 years of QA frustration into an AI-powered solution for modern software teams.
Tweener Founder Spotlights
Every startup begins with a moment: the late-night idea, the stubborn problem, or the feeling that someone has to fix this.
Our Founder Spotlights series highlights the people behind the startups: the spark that got them started, the struggles that tested them, and the community that keeps them building. These stories remind us that innovation doesn’t just happen in the lab or the boardroom, it happens in moments of frustration, curiosity, and persistence.
This week, we’re featuring Ivan Barajas Vargas, CEO and Co-Founder of MuukTest, a company using AI to transform how teams test and ship software.
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Faster Feedback, Smarter Software: Building Muuktest with Ivan Vargas
Lessons You’ll Hear Between the Lines
There’s a lot to learn from Ivan’s path. Here’s the short version before we get into it:
Start where your expertise runs deepest.
Big milestones are built on a hundred small validations.
Interview better, not just more. Learn the “why” behind customer pain.
The right network changes everything. Ask for help early and often.
Stay rooted in community. The Triangle’s openness is its edge.
From Bottleneck to Breakthrough
After 21 years in software quality and testing, Ivan Barajas Vargas had seen the same pattern too many times. Testing was expensive, fragile, and painfully slow. Even inside world-class companies like Dell EMC and IBM, the process required massive teams, months of maintenance, and millions in cost, just to make sure software didn’t break.
“Companies need feedback on their product quality every time they release new code,” Ivan said. “That process takes days, weeks or months sometimes. So what we are doing is accelerating that with AI.”
He and his co-founder, Renan Ugalde, built MuukTest to automate that feedback loop, compressing what once took weeks into minutes. The mission? Make quality testing as fast and frictionless as software development itself.
Ivan traveled to Guadalajara in 2024 to meet with team members from the region.
Finding the Signal
Like many founders, their first step wasn’t coding. It was listening.
After exploring a few unrelated startup ideas, Ivan realized the biggest opportunity was in the space he already knew best: testing. They talked to 20 software engineering managers across their network, and the response was unanimous.
“Everyone said, ‘yeah, we hate testing. It’s slow, it’s expensive.’ So we said, okay, there is something there”.
A few early believers told them, “When you have something, show me.”
That was the first yes, and the first hint that this idea was worth pursuing. Then came a bigger one: an NC IDEA grant, validating the vision. A month later, their first paying customer.
It didn’t happen overnight. From idea to first users took six months; from prototype to real traction, eighteen. Each small yes built confidence that MuukTest was solving a problem worth solving.
Learning to Listen Better
Looking back, Ivan says his biggest lesson was learning how to interview customers.
“I wish we’d learned the Jobs To Be Done framework earlier,” he said. “It taught me how to approach customer interviews to uncover their struggles and the progress they want to make.”
In the beginning, they were just asking surface-level questions and missing the real insights. The shift from casual conversations to meaningful, structured interviews, from gathering opinions to discovering motivations, became core to how MuukTest designs products today.
The Muuktest team after customer success sessions
Never Building Alone: The Power of the Triangle
Another core part of MuukTest’s story is community. Even in the toughest moments, Ivan says he never felt alone, and credits the Triangle startup ecosystem for that.
“Almost everyone replies to an email here,” he said. “When we needed help, we just asked, and we got it.”
Ivan first came to the Triangle from Mexico in 2011 for a QA architect role, and stayed for the people.
“It was a great offer and a great region,” he said. “I already had in mind doing an MBA. So when I got the offer, I said there are three big schools there with great MBA programs, so I’ll do one of those programs.”
More than a decade later, it’s still the Triangle’s collaborative spirit that stands out most to him.
“I’ve talked to 95% of the entrepreneurs I’ve wanted to here. People are open, they help each other.”
That spirit of collaboration is what keeps founders like Ivan building here, and what makes the Triangle more than just a place to work.
MuukFest 2023: a team tour around downtown Guadalajara. MuukFest is MuukTest’s annual meetup, bringing the remote team together for workshops, strategy sessions, and team-building.
What’s Next
MuukTest recently closed a seed extension round, focusing on product repeatability and early signs of scale. They’ve launched a new integration for Visual Studio Code and GitHub Copilot, allowing developers to generate end-to-end tests automatically within their coding environment, bringing testing closer to where developers already work.
Next up? More integrations across tools like Cursor and Cloud platforms, expanding MuukTest’s mission to help every role from developer, designer, to product manager, participate in software testing.
Find Ivan Barajas Vargas and Renan Ugalde on LinkedIn and explore MuukTest at muuktest.com.
Explore more Tweener portfolio companies at tweenerfund.com.
Next on Tweener Founder Spotlights
Founders who turn real frustrations into real solutions… that’s the energy we’re here to celebrate. Stay tuned for the next spotlight in our Q3 series, highlighting more of the builders shaping the Triangle’s future.