Yet one more SaaS startup, which started its journey in India, has attained the much-coveted unicorn standing. BrowserStack, a startup that operates an enormous software program testing platform, mentioned on Wednesday it has raised $200 million in a brand new financing spherical that valued the 10-year-old agency at $4 billion.
BOND led the Dublin and San Francisco-headquartered startup’s Collection B financing spherical, whereas Perception Companions and current investor Accel participated in it. BrowserStack, which for the primary six years of its journey didn’t increase any cash and stays worthwhile, has raised $250 million thus far.
As firms transfer to fast improvement cycles they typically don’t have the time to carry out ample testing. As an example, say Google is working to launch a brand new cell app. The search large will need to check the brand new app on hundreds — if not tens of hundreds — of various cell units.
At current, even an organization the scale of Google will discover it cumbersome to safe, retailer and preserve all these check units. That’s the place BrowserStack comes into play.
The startup has 15 knowledge facilities internationally and a repository of over 2,000 units. BrowserStack, which started its journey in Mumbai, licenses its service to corporations to allow them to remotely check their apps and web sites on its units, defined Nakul Aggarwal, co-founder and CTO of BrowserStack, in an interview with TechCrunch.
“Our mission has at all times been to assist engineers construct wonderful merchandise for his or her clients. Every time they’re creating an app or a web site they’ve to make sure that it really works throughout the fragmented ecosystem,” mentioned Aggarwal, referring to numerous sorts of cell units, tablets, TVs, wearables and different platforms. “We’re making certain that engineers don’t have to fret about constructing their very own in-house labs for units.”
Google will not be a hypothetical instance. The Android-maker together with giants together with Amazon, Microsoft, Twitter, Tesco, Ikea, Spotify, Expedia and Trivago are amongst over 50,000 clients of BrowserStack. Over 60% of BrowserStack’s clients at the moment are within the U.S.
BrowserStack founders Nakul Aggarwal and Ritesh Arora (Picture: BrowserStack)
“As software program continues to rewire every little thing, the bar on pace and high quality continues to rise, and testing software program throughout the increasing variety of browsers and units is a big and costly problem for improvement groups to handle on their very own,” mentioned Jay Simons, common companion at BOND, in a press release.
“BrowserStack makes this straightforward and cost-effective, giving builders on the spot entry to the widest vary of browser and machine configurations to check their functions. This product is an absolute boon for at the moment’s internet and app builders.”
It wasn’t till early 2018 when BrowserStack, which bootstrapped its technique to profitability, first raised capital from an investor. Aggarwal mentioned the founding staff’s earlier failed ventures made them extra disciplined about cash and it wasn’t till BrowserStack had assumed the market-leading place and started scaling to new markets that it began to discover exterior capital.
Aggarwal mentioned BrowserStack needs to turn into the testing infrastructure of the web and the brand new funds will assist obtain that. “Each pull request that’s getting increase, we need to turn into the infrastructure the place it’s getting examined,” he mentioned. The startup, which lately acquired visible testing and evaluation platform Percy, is open to extra acquisition and acquihire alternatives.
“Our current acquisition of Percy, a visible testing platform, was simply the beginning. We’ll speed up the speed at which we take new merchandise to market by means of acquisitions and funding in our Product and Engineering groups. We need to obtain our imaginative and prescient of changing into the testing infrastructure for the web,” mentioned Ritesh Arora, co-founder and chief govt of BrowserStack.
BrowserStack joins various SaaS startups — together with Chargebee and Gupshup — that started their journey in India and have become a unicorn this yr.
