BrowserStack raises $200 million at $4 billion valuation

CHENNAI: Software testing platform BrowserStack has closed a $200 million Series B funding round at a valuation of $4 billion. US-based tech investment firm BOND, which has backed tech giants such as Facebook, Airbnb, Uber and others, led the round, which also saw participation of Insight Partners and existing investor Accel. With this, BrowserStack becomes the seventh Indian SaaS startup to enter the unicorn club and the 15th unicorn in India in 2021.
The investment will help support strategic acquisitions that BrowserStack plans to take up, expansion of its product offerings and continued scale and growth, the company said.The company recently acquired Percy, a visual testing platform, and plans to acquire more such technologies.
The startup also wants to reward its employees and said it would be kicking off a buyback as part of the raise after completing one last year.
Founded in 2011 by IIT-Bombay grads Ritesh Arora and Nakul Aggarwal, BrowserStack enables companies to move their software testing to the cloud and counts over 50,000 customers including Microsoft, Twitter, Ikea, Spotify, Expedia and others and over four million developer signups. BrowserStack 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.
“This funding will allow us to explore the different ways in which we can bring new products to market - via acquisitions, via acqui-hires or by investing more heavily in our product and engineering teams,” Ritesh Arora, co-founder and CEO, Browserstack, said.
“We plan to double our headcount to 1,600 over the next 18 months, across all our locations,” he added.
"As software continues to rewire everything, the bar on speed and quality continues to rise, and testing software across the expanding number of browsers and devices is a huge and expensive challenge for development teams to manage on their own," Jay Simons, general partner at BOND, said, noting that the product is a boon for today's web and app developers.
As Covid accelerates digital transformation and drives companies to leverage cloud solutions to replace on-premise infrastructure, BrowserStack claims it has seen a significant uptick in business. The company has been profitable since day 1, and says it has more than tripled its employee base to over 750 employees across seven countries in the last three years. Prior to this, BrowserStack raised around $50 million in Series A in 2018 from Accel.
The startup has offices in Dublin, San Francisco, New York and Mumbai, and its R&D team is spread across locations. BrowserStack has opened ten new data centers worldwide in the last three years to take their global network to 15 data centres.