BrowserStack, a web and mobile browser testing platform, has raised $50 million (about Rs 318 crore) in a Series A round from US-based venture capital firm Accel Partners, a company statement said.
The VC firm also picked a minority equity stake in the firm. The investment will allow the company to expand its team and raise global brand awareness, the statement added.
The Mumbai- and San Francisco-based profitable company has been bootstrapped until now and this is its first external round of funding.
Ryan Sweeney, Nate Niparko, and Shekhar Kirani (India partner) led the deal for Accel. As part of the transaction, Sweeney will join BrowserStack's board of directors. The company also announced that its San Francisco office will function as its second headquarters.
Founded in Mumbai in 2011 by serial entrepreneurs Ritesh Arora and Nakul Aggarwal, BrowserStack is used by developers across the globe to ensure that software is free of bugs and agile to deploy. The company has more than 40,000 customers apart from two million developers in 135 countries using the browser testing platform.
Arora and Aggarwal, who are also IIT Bombay alumni, previously co-founded QuarkBase.com and Downcase.com. BrowserStack is their third venture together.
Run by Browserstack Software Pvt Ltd, the firm enables developers to test websites and mobile applications across thousands of real mobile devices, browsers and operating systems. It had so far largely built a global customer base due to developers' word-of-mouth reference. The company has onboarded Google veteran Shailesh Rao as its chief operating officer to help the company grow and scale its global business.
"Today's funding allows us to invest in enhancing our testing infrastructure suite and expanding our enterprise go-to-market capabilities while maintaining our extraordinary growth trajectory, especially in the North American market, where we expect to increase our presence significantly over 2018," said Arora, co-founder and chief executive.
BrowserStack's customers—which range from startups to large enterprises —include Microsoft, Twitter, Mastercard, Barclays, Gap, TD Ameritrade, Lincoln Financial, mytoys and Yahoo! Japan. More than half of BrowserStack's customers are based in North America.
“Accel has a long history of empowering developers, with investments in global companies like Atlassian, Slack and PagerDuty,” said Sweeney. “Like these other developer-oriented software businesses, BrowserStack puts an emphasis on making developers' lives easier through its powerful and intuitive products. The rapid growth of software development combined with shorter software release cycles has put an emphasis on efficient testing processes," he added.
When testing and deploying new products, organisations can face a number of pitfalls including slower deployment and poor device coverage. BrowserStack enables companies to choose from more than 1,200 real devices and browser combinations and rely on a secure, scalable infrastructure to support thousands of concurrent manual and automated tests. BrowserStack replaces the need to own and manage every combination of device and browser or invest in scaling in-house testing infrastructure.
