Software testing platform BrowserStack on Wednesday said it has raised a fresh $200 million in funding led by Bond at a valuation of $4 billion, joining the growing league of homegrown unicorns. Founded in 2011 by Ritesh Arora and Nakul Aggarwal, the company runs offices in Mumbai, New York, Dublin and San Francisco.
The investment, which is part of the SaaS (software-as-a-service) start-up’s series B financial round, also saw participation from Insight Partners and existing backer Accel. The firm will deploy the capital to fund strategic acquisitions, expand its product offerings and build on its growth.
In 2018, the start-up had secured $50 million in series A funding from Accel.
BrowserStack’s products help developers build bug-free software for the nearly 5 billion internet users accessing websites and mobile applications through varied digital environments – devices, browsers, operating systems, and versions. The company provides developers access to a cloud platform that allows them to comprehensively test their websites and mobile applications, replacing the need for teams to own and manage an in-house test infrastructure. The startup counts Google, Amazon, Microsoft, Twitter, Tesco, IKEA, and Spotify as its clients among others.
“We are going to double-down on solving new developer problems in the space of DevOps testing,” said co-founder & CEO Ritesh Arora in a statement. “We will accelerate the rate at which we take new products to market through acquisitions and investment in our product and engineering teams. We want to achieve our vision of becoming the testing infrastructure for the internet,” Arora said.
BrowserStack claims to have more than tripled its employee base to over 750 across seven countries and opened ten new data centres worldwide in the last three years.
According to IDC, the global SaaS market is expected to cross $276 billion by FY24. Credit Suisse recently wrote in its report on 100 unicorns, the emergence and adoption of new technologies such as cloud, mobile, RPA, AI and the like over the last 5-10 years has not only facilitated increased penetration of the SaaS business model but also brought about new verticals/areas where SaaS can be deployed. “For example cybersecurity, API, analytics, have become emerging areas of focus for SaaS companies,” Credit Suisse observed.
