ANOTHER SAAS STARTUP ENTERS THE UNICORN CLUB – BROWSERSTACK HAS BECOME THE 15TH INDIAN STARTUP THIS YEAR.

The Indian Startup ecosystem has seen a boom and with 14 startups entering the coveted unicorn club, BrowserStack has been the latest entrant, taking the toll to 15 within 6 months of this year. Although the pandemic shook the market, the startup ecosystem has been striving hard towards growing our economy and making lives easier through their innovative solutions for problems across various verticals. With 5 billion internet users across the globe, testing for developers remains a key bottleneck in the DevOps cycle, and to remain competitive, companies need to release software with speed and quality, which can set them apart in the market.

BrowserStack, a cloud-based web, and mobile application testing platform was founded in 2011 by Nakul Aggarwal & Ritesh Arora at a coffee shop to solve a single problem – testing on various browsers. BrowserStack is a home-grown SaaS Software testing platform that allows Dev and QA teams to access the platform effortlessly and rely on the cloud platform to deliver an amazing experience to every customer. Securing $200 million in its Series B round, this SaaS startup has entered the coveted unicorn club with a valuation of $4 billion. According to a report by Bain & Company, the Indian SaaS companies have the potential to capture a 7-9% share of the global SaaS market by 2022. This can be rightly foreseen as BrowserStack is the seventh Indian SaaS company to enter the unicorn club following Freshworks, Druva, Icertis, Postman, Zenoti, and Chargebee. 

This Mumbai- and San Francisco- based startup counts over 50,000 customers across 135 countries with four million developers signed up, the platform aims to help developers build bug-free software accessed through millions of combinations of digital environments – devices, browsers, operating systems, and versions. With an investment of $200M in a round led by US-based marquee investment firm, BOND, with participation from Insight Partners and existing investor Accel. Having raised $50M in their Series A round in Jan 2018, the startup has tripled its employee base to 750+ across 7 countries with 10 new data centres worldwide in the last three years. This latest unicorn boasts category  leaders such as Google, Amazon, Microsoft, Twitter, Tesco, IKEA, Spotify, Expedia, and Trivago among others as their customers. Being a developer-first brand ever since its inception, BrowserStack focuses on product-led growth and replaces the need for teams to own and manage an in-house testing infrastructure through their platform.

“Our global footprint of 15 data centers allows us to serve every developer from a location as close as possible to them. This reduces latency, which saves developers time, and helps them release fast. We will continue to invest in our platform to ensure every developer has an amazing experience.”, said Nakul Aggarwal, co-founder, and CTO of BrowserStack.

The company intends to utilize the fresh capital from the investment towards making strategic acquisitions, expanding its product offerings, and doubling up its employee base to 1600 over the next 18 months. Speaking on this matter, Ritesh Arora, co-founder, and CEO of BrowserStack said, “We are going to double-down on solving new developer problems in the space of DevOps testing. 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. We want to achieve our vision of becoming the testing infrastructure for the internet.”  

Speaking on the investment, Jay Simons, General Partner at BOND said, “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. BrowserStack makes this simple and cost-effective, giving developers instant access to the widest range of browser and device configurations to test their applications. This product is an absolute boon for today’s web and app developers.”

With plans to expand globally, the startup has tailored an onboarding programme for remote employees which has seen success given the pandemic constraints. Find out how your company can make testing a breeze using BrowserStack today!