Cloud-based cross-browser testing tool BrowserStack has raised $50 million Series A funding from Accel Partners. Mumbai-headquartered BrowserStack will be valued at around $400 million after this round of financing. Accel India and Accel Growth participated in the funding round along with their US-based partner Ryan Sweeney.
The newly acquired financing will be used by the company to improve their overall global awareness as well as for expanding their team and infrastructure. They are hoping for an extensive rise in 2018, especially in North America. BrowerStack also announced the opening of their new headquarters in San Francisco, North America. Shailesh Rao, the ex-managing director of Google India is going to head their operations as the Chief Operating Officer.
BrowserStack was founded in 2011 by IIT Bombay students Ritesh Arora and Nakul Aggarwal to provide a platform for web developers to test their websites on various platforms, operating systems, devices and browser configurations. This is their fourth venture and the first to succeed. Any website or web application must function properly on a number of browsers like Windows Internet Explorer, Apple Safari, Google Chrome, Mozilla, Opera etc. as well as on various platforms running various operating systems like desktop, mobile, tablet, laptop etc. If your web presence is not tested properly, it can tamper the user experience if the browser or the platform changes.
After this round of funding, BrowserStack has shredded away its bootstrapped status. Since its inception in 2011, BrowserStack has acquired a huge user base with over 25,000 paying customers. Also, over 1.6 million developers use BrowserStack to test their websites. With over 60 million tests per month, BrowserStack lets developers choose from over 1200 devices to deliver bug-free websites and mobile applications with a support of a lot of concurrent manual and automated tests.
The company has partnered with Microsoft, Chrome and Firefox to let users test their software on the respective browsers. It is estimated to earn around $30 million in annual recurring revenue. BrowserStack competes with certain browser testing tools like Browsershots, Sauce Labs, Browsera, and TestingBot.