Indian cloud-based web and mobile app testing platform BrowserStack has secured USD 200 million in a Series B funding round led by San Francisco-headquartered venture capital firm BOND at a valuation of USD 4 billion, the company said on Wednesday. Insight Partners and existing backer Accel also participated in the funding round.
This makes BrowserStack the 15th Indian firm to enter the elite billion-dollar club this year and the seventh SaaS company from the country to gain the coveted tag. The other privately-held SaaS players with over USD 1 billion valuations include Freshworks, Druva, Icertis, Postman, Zenoti, and Chargebee. At a USD 4 billion valuation, BrowserStack has emerged as the most valuable SaaS company from India, leaving behind Freshworks, which is preparing to go public in the US.
The investment will support BrowserStack’s strategic acquisitions, expansion of its product offerings, and continued scale and growth, the company said in a statement.
BrowserStack was started in 2011 by Ritesh Arora and Nakul Aggarwal in a “coffee shop” in Mumbai, “to solve one problem—testing on different browsers,” the company wrote in a blog announcing the fresh funding. It led to “BrowserStack’s first version, which helped developers test their websites on Internet Explorer 11 (IE11).”
The ten-year-old company, now headquartered in Dublin and San Francisco, boasts over 50,000 customers across 135 countries, with four million developer signups. It claims to have half the Fortune 500 companies as customers, including Google, Amazon, Microsoft, Twitter, Tesco, IKEA, Spotify, Expedia, and Trivago.
“We are going to double-down on solving new developer problems in the space of DevOps testing,” said Arora, co-founder and CEO of BrowserStack, in a statement. “Our recent acquisition of Percy, a visual testing platform, was just the start.”
“We will accelerate the rate at which we take new products to market through acquisitions and investment in our product and engineering teams,” he added. “We want to achieve our vision of becoming the testing infrastructure for the internet.”
It should be noted that for the first seven years, BrowserStack bootstrapped its operations. In 2018, the company raised USD 50 million from Accel and began expanding aggressively. In the last three years, BrowserStack has more than tripled its employee base to over 750 across seven countries and opened ten new data centers worldwide, taking their total number to 15. The software-testing company now plans to increase its team size to 1,000 people this year and double its current team by the end of 2022.
The company also aims to expand its product suite to cater to testing beyond web and mobile and enter new segments such as smart TVs, wearables, and other internet-connected devices, Aggarwal, co-founder and CTO of BrowserStack, told local media Economic Times.
“We estimate the market opportunity in the space that we are in is about USD 45 billion, and it is growing very healthily at 20% year-on-year. Today, we target about 25 million developers, and that’ll probably be 50 million in the next ten years,” Aggarwal said.
According to Jay Simons, general partner at BOND, at a time when companies need to release software with speed and quality to remain competitive, testing software across the expanding number of browsers and devices is a huge and expensive challenge for development teams to manage on their own.
“BrowserStack makes this simple and cost-effective, giving developers instant access to the widest range of browser and device configurations to test their applications,” Simons said in a statement. “This product is an absolute boon for today’s web and app developers.”
