Photo Credit: Photo Mix from Pixabay

The global mobile application testing services market is expected to grow at 20% CAGR. While 90% of this testing happens in-house, that trend is shifting. India’s Unicorn player BrowserStack is a leading player in the market that pegs the market at $45 billion and is targeting to gather 50% market share.

BrowserStack’s Offerings

Founded in 2011 by Nakul Aggarwal and Ritesh Arora, Mumbai and San Francisco-based BrowserStack is a software testing platform that helps customers deliver quality software quickly by moving testing to their cloud. The two founders had met each other while studying at IIT Mumbai. They were serial entrepreneurs and had already set up a few companies including QuarkRank, QuarkBase, and Downcase. When they were building a website for Downcase, they realized that it was very frustrating to not be able to test it across a variety of devices and browsers. They decided to address this problem by establishing BrowserStack.

As companies expand their digital offerings, they expect higher speed and quality from their applications. Testing software across the growing number of browsers and devices is becoming an expensive challenge for development teams to manage on their own. BrowserStack provides these developers with instant access to the widest range of browser and device configurations to test their applications in a simple and cost-effective manner. It offers a virtual, interactive environment within the browser, and a virtual machine with the necessary browsers and developer tools loaded so that users can test a web application in real-time.

Today, BrowserStack’s platform provides instant access to over 3,000 real mobile devices and browsers on a reliable cloud infrastructure that effortlessly scales while the need for testing increases. It allows both developer and QA teams to move quickly while improving their customer experience. Its customers include tech giants Google, Amazon, Microsoft, and other 50,000 more organizations globally.

BrowserStack wants to become the testing infrastructure of the Internet. To achieve this mission, it recently announced the acquisition of Percy, a leading visual testing and review platform. Agile teams usually deploy code to production several times a day. To ensure that they maintain their release velocity while avoiding visual bugs becomes a difficult task. Percy’s solution helps teams automate visual testing by capturing screenshots and comparing them against the baseline and highlighting visual changes. As visual coverage increases, teams are able to deploy code changes with every commit. Terms of the acquisition were not disclosed. The acquisition will allow BrowserStack to expand its offerings to the developers.

Recently, BrowserStack also announced integrations with Atlassian’s Jira Software and Trello. The integrations assist developers, allowing them to instantly capture and share issues across teams within BrowserStack instead of switching between tools. They will allow developers to reduce the bug filing process to a fraction of the original time. Users are given the ability to instantly share and file issues across teams within their BrowserStack workflow.

BrowserStack’s Financials

BrowserStack remains privately held and its recent financials are not known. To date, it has raised $250 million in 2 rounds of funding led by Insight Partners, Accel, and Bond. Its most recent round was held in June 2021, where it raised $200 million and had a valuation of $4 billion.

BrowserStack plans to utilize the funds to increase team size in the next 18 months and make strategic acquisitions to expand its market to testing beyond web and mobile and enter new segments such as smart TVs, wearables, and other internet-connected devices.

I would like to see BrowserStack’s financials to justify its high valuation. In the past the company has been very prudent with its financials, having bootstrapped its way till 2018. It was already profitable when it raised its first round of funding from Accel in 2018.