Test Automation Investments Are Now Of $1.5B

The test automation market is hot.

The forecasted growth ranges from $12.6 billion in 2019 to $28.8 billion in 2024, according to Global Market Insights. In a context of digitalization with companies in search of acceleration, the race is only starting.

$3.6B have been injected in the software test automation market since 2016 changing the existing landscape. This article shares the top 21 investments in the test automation space in 2022 to project future evolutions.

These investments aim to allow development teams to move at the speed of business without compromising software quality, where test automation plays a significant role.

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$433M: Postman to become the #1 API Marketplace

98% of Fortune 500 companies like Salesforce, Stripe, Kroger, Cisco, PayPal, and Microsoft use Postman. The company announced their public API Network as the largest API hub in the world with more than 75,000 APIs.

In June 2020, Postman raised $150M already reaching a $2B valuation. One year later, they closed a $225M deal in Series D Round to be valued at $5.6B entering in the top 10 most valued Indian startups.

Postman continues to release new capabilities at a fast pace, notably: Postman on the web, public workspaces, the Private API Network, the Public API Network, API security validations, OpenAPI validations, support for protocols.

$250M: Browserstack to ease web & mobile testing

The company – from India like Postman – focuses on providing web and mobile devices in the cloud. Their service has been increasing worldwide to simplify cross-browser and mobile testing.

They raised $250M while acquiring Nightwatch.js in 2021, the popular open-source test automation framework for Node.js (one of the fastest-growing Selenium-based tools with 1 million monthly npm installs and over 10.5k GitHub stars).

$172M: Tricentis acquisitions from Vienna

The software testing company has raised $165 million in Series B financing. The funding comes from Insight Venture Partners, a leading global private equity and venture capital firm.

Tricentis has been on fire to consolidate their offer through 7 acquisitions:

Figure 2: The acquisitions made by Tricentis, Tracxn

Each solution has been adding up to their offer:

  • Testim is a UI-based testing
  • Flood is a load testing solution
  • Neotys specialized in performance test service
  • TestProject is an open-source test automation platform
  • Tx3 Services focuses on healthcare and life science
  • Q-up provides test data management
  • SpecFlow, a BDD framework for .NET

$150M: Sauce Labs, a challenger to Browserstack

Founded out of San Francisco in 2008, Sauce Labs has been making software for testing websites since it began. It expanded to Android, iOS, and MacOS apps over-time.

Sauce Labs’ offers a cloud-based platform for automated testing across 800 different browsers, operating systems, and device combinations. It had raised $70M in 2016, already counting customers like Salesforce, Lyft, Zendesk, Visa, and PayPal.

$115M: Applause to accelerate functional testing

Applause is a platform focusing on automated functional testing combined with crowd testing. The app testing firm Applause already raked in $35 million from Goldman Sachs, Scale Venture Partners, and others in a previous round.

$76.1M: Mabl to disrupt with Googlers founders

Mabl is an automated software testing platform with machine learning in its roots to detect with more proactivity errors, leaks, and visual regressions, among other glitches in websites.

Mabl was founded in Boston in 2017 by former Googlers Dan Belcher and Izzy Azeri, who had sold Stackdriver in 2014, now available natively in Google Cloud Platform. The company is now searching to accelerate.

Mabl snagged a $20 million investment from GV, Alphabet’s venture capital arm, for its AI-powered web and testing toolset. Prior to now, Mabl had raised $10 million in funding, and with another $20 million in the bank.

$71.9M: Leapwork, the automation platform moving to testing

Founded in 2015, Leapwork was built for a modern and light approach to business automation in a user-friendly way. Its product has been used for test automation with the drag-and-drop interface.

The Copenhagen-based company Leapwork got its last round at €52.6 million for its no-code software test automation platform in August 2021. It is surfing on the low-code automation adoption in part powered by skills shortage.

$70M: LambdaTest to accelerate test automation farms

LambdaTest, a well-known test execution platform that raised $45 million on March 29 in a Series C financing round. The former CEO of software testing firm Tricentis, joined the round, bringing the all-time amount raised to $70 million.

Founded in 2017, LambdaTest had earlier raised close to $25 million in funding from investment firms. Using LambdaTest’s score test execution engine, users may test their websites and apps on over 3,000 distinct combinations of devices.

$54.8M: Cypress.io to build an end-to-end testing platform

Cypress.io is a free and open source, MIT-licensed, testing tool written in JavaScript. It has a massive 37,400 Stars on Github and is used by organizations such as NASA and DHL.

The product exploded with the use of Javascript languages in modern web&app platforms, taking the opportunity of developers doing more tests by themselves.

Cypress.io raised $4M back in 2018 when focusing on front-end testing, followed by a $40M investment in 2020 to give the ability to write all forms of tests – unit, component, integration, and end-to-end.

They will also develop the Cypress Dashboard to collect results from testing of all types, providing objective quality metrics, actionable insights, and a comprehensive debugging experience to all quality stakeholders.

$50.7M: QASymphony to develop their product

Founded out of Atlanta, Georgia in 2011, QASymphony offers a range of testing and quality assurance (QA) tools to use along the software lifecycle, focusing on supporting an efficient collaboration experience.

Their QTest platform can be deployed on-premises or in the cloud is accessible to different stakeholders including development teams to organize their testing while natively providing reporting.

In May 2017, software testing platform QASymphony raised $40 million. The company claims around 400 customers—including Salesforce, Cisco, Adobe, Samsung, and Verizon—in 20 countries.

$41.8M: Applitools for AI-powered testing

Applitools is based in San Mateo, California and Ramat-Gan, Israel. The product was built with AI by design for visual testing automation and monitoring for mobile, web and native apps.

In July 2017, Applitools raised $8 million in a Series B round of funding followed by $31M in 2018. In 2021, Thomas Bravos invested $250M to accelerate their products in the DevOps ecosystem worldwide.

We noted in the ecosystem the departure of the emblematic Angie Jones in December 2021, largely involved in the test automation community. All the best Angie!

$34.2M: Kobiton to powered the mobile testing platform 

Kobiton is a mobile device testing platform that accelerates the testing and delivery of mobile applications. It focuses on a flow starting from testing real devices to then create a test automation suite.

Its customers include unicorns and large companies in gaming, finance, retail, and so on. Kobiton raised $12M in september 2021 to accelerate the development of their mobile testing products.

$27M: Katalon, the backed test automation platform 

Katalon provides a Studio derived from the famous Eclipse IDE for developers. It provides a test automation tool built on top of the open-source automation frameworks such as Selenium and Appium.

They target to provide a unified test automation experience for web, mobile, API and desktop application testing. Its initial release was in January 2015. Katalon raised a $1M seed at the end of 2020 followed by $27 million in Series A in June 2021.

Similarly to Cypress.io, Katalon launched their Katalon TestOps product to provide better integration with DevOps, Cloud as well as providing reporting capabilities to the entire team.

$19.5M: Testlio with to accelerate crowd testing

Testlio, from Estonia, wants to revolutionize software testing giving access to experts all over the world as well as advanced testing services on top of test automation needs.

Testlio has exceeded a $20 million annualized revenue run rate 2021 after previously raising only $7.5 million in seed and Series A capital. The company has increased revenue by 50% and employees by nearly 100% year-over-year.

In 2021, Testlio got a $12M investment to add up to their 150 internal teams, 10,000+ vetted freelance testers across 150 countries around the world.

$19.5M: Testim with a 700% Market Growth

Founded in late 2014, Testim platform, which uses artificial intelligence to speed up test authoring and dramatically reduce test maintenance. 

Testim raised $10M after a impressive 700% market growth in Series B funding to address the global demand for continuous testing. Following that move, Tricentis acquired Testim in 2022.

$19.2M: Functionize to accelerate their DevOps test automation

Functionize is a pure SaaS product natively integrating with DevOps platforms like Jenkins, AWS CodePipeline, etc. It focused on simplicity with natural language processing to enable developers to type out tests in plain English.

The product also provides a range of features including API calls, two-factor authentication, cookie storage, and invisible elements. They also have internal computer vision algorithms trained for self-healing.

Functionize raises $16M in 2019 after a $2.5 million seed round in February 2018 and brought the company’s total raised to $18.2 million. In 2021, another deal followed but was not disclosed.

$16.5M: Test.ai to support the increase in mobile app testing

Test.ai is the AI-First automation framework that puts you in control of bots. Bots can navigate, see, learn, and execute test cases offering a fully automated mobile app testing solution that enables enterprises to quickly deliver better quality apps.

Test.ai raised $16.5M back in 2015.

$15M to $117M: Headspin, the mobile app testing platform

HeadSpin gives you the ability to test your user experience on any device and in any country that you choose—Android or iOS. The company has been rapidly expanding in this mobile market segment.

In 2020, Headspin announced a $60 million Series C funding. The round brings the total amount raised since inception to $117 million. But downturns with sales projection impacted its valuation, explaining its ranking here.

$13.3M: Virtuoso for customer journey’s testing

Virtuoso is a SaaS software testing platform created in 2019 combining machine learning and Robotic Process Automation (RPA) to “make testing simpler and faster”. 

Virtuoso says it aims to create fully autonomous testing with little to no human interaction, enabling non-coders and coders to write automated tests in plain English.

Virtuoso raised $13.3M in Series A funding. Have a look at their journey concept and youtube channel for a concrete demonstration.

$13M: Autify for no-code & AI-powered test automation

Autify aims to reduce the burden of slow and painful testing effort building a no-code and AI-powered software testing automation platform. Chikazawa and co-founder Sam Yamashita started Autify in 2016 in San Francisco.

The three key features of Autify for web and mobile are cross-browser, multi-device testing in parallel; auto-repair with AI; and visual regression test. Autify’s AI detects any changes in the source code/UI and automatically corrects the test scenario. 

Now, Autify’s software testing automation addresses the issues of a labor shortage as well as technical difficulty through its no-code platform. They raised a $10M Series A round.

$7.1M: Runscope to accelerate API development lifecycle

Runscope is a product to help developers test and debug APIs. It raised a $1.1 million seed round in early 2013. The raise followed by the launch of Radar, its flagship product for testing backend services. 

A $6 million in a Series A funding round led by General Catalyst Partners, when the Runscope’s acquisition by CA Technologies happened in 2017.

$4.6M: TestSigma to support web and mobile testing

TestSigma is a cloud-based continuous testing platform for Agile and DevOps teams focusing on web and mobile applications to achieve continuous testing with a Shift-Left approach. 

The company raised $400-500K back in 2020 to develop the company. An official raise of $4.6M followed in 2022 in order to accelerate TestSigma development that , like Postman, came from India.

$25K+: Appsurify for risk-based testing powered by AI

Appsurify provides an AI-based automated testing solution. The product offered by the company is TestBrain which provides a solution for risk-based manual testing, test automation, and failure elimination.It also offers DevMetrix for code analysis.

Created in 2017, Appsurify got a $25K ticket from accelerator and incubator to create the product. In August 2020, it received a new investment of a non-disclosed amount to accelerate its development.

$2B: UiPath to apply RPA in Test Automation

UiPath’s self-proclaimed mission is “to unlock human creativity and ingenuity by enabling the Fully Automated Enterprise™ and empowering workers through automation.” to deploy automations across departments.

UiPath raised $2B in total funding over 7 funding rounds, reaching a valuation of $1.1B. The company is a leader in the quickly growing Robotic Process Automation (RPA) market, raising capital from 2015, according to Crunchbase.

Figure 1: The UiPath Capital acquisition through the various rounds, Techcrunch.

The product is trying to compete in Test Automation for Robotic Test Automation and RPA Testing leveraging its core capabilities. Its direct competition in RPA includes Microsoft Power Automate, Blue Prism, Automation Anywhere, SAP.

Not all the investment is going to testing. However, UiPath is one of the fastest growing technology segments with ambitions on test automation. It is necessary to keep an eye on it in the future.

The fight for moving at the speed of business is only starting

All these acquisitions are rapidly growing in a market previously seen as a cost, necessary for larger companies with a “Quality Assurance” department. But the need to accelerate software for business survival changes that equation.

Development teams need confidence to deliver accelerated software changes with confidence. Test automation is now coming as a necessity for that objective, and not anymore as an evil task performed by a third-party team.

Aside from the investments, notable acquisitions are also changing the market with Smartbear that acquired Hiptest, cucumber.io, Zephyr, Bitbar and others for more than $3.14B. Similarly, RadView acquired Shield34, Keysight bet on Eggplant for $330M.

Investments is a way to capture economies of speed by accessing a variety of services and resources much faster than with self-funding. It is a good sign, but not a predictor of good decisions, profits and product innovation in the long-run.

This additional content lets you see clear on the test automation market moves.

Quality Engineering or Die Trying

There is no time to lose.

Even if you avoid risks, the current digital landscape is pressuring the existing actors to continuously reinvent their value proposition.

New actors are emerging as unicorns in less than 2 years, creating new markets and disrupting existing ones, including your company.

Quality Engineering is the paradigm constraining the software lifecycle for continuous value delivery to achieve Quality at Speed.

I am now driven by the motto “Quality Engineering or Die Trying”, applying it in my software activities and also naming the QE Unit newsletter that way.

Why living by Quality Engineering or Die Trying

Digitalization is impacting every sector, from retail, manufacturing, finance, agriculture to health, at an accelerated rate. 

The pressure to transform will only increase as more and more actors leverage technology to expand their value proposition.

Only actors at the high-standard will survive.

Similarly to the evolution theory, it is not about only being a big actor; the speed at which an organization can continuously adapt is more important.

This change of paradigm can be summarized in the need to capture both economies of scale (as in previous industrial revolution) and economies of speed.

Our digital world depends on software supporting the user experience, internal operations to the collaboration with other companies.

Hence, survival depends on Quality Engineering or Die Trying.

Who needs to follow Quality Engineering or Die Trying

Traditional approach to software production relies on similar mechanisms of the industrial revolution: vertical and siloed functions.

This specialization is necessary as each function becomes more complex (think about DevOps, Data Science), requiring a deep expertise.

The problem is that it makes transversal collaboration harder, slowing down the speed of iterations.

Agile and DevOps contributed to broader collaboration across silos to deliver more value at an accelerated rate.

Quality Engineering is there to reconcile to streamline the software activities for fast feedback loops of value delivery.

Anyone wanting to learn, contribute and share on Quality Engineering is welcome; we need to connect expertises of the entire software value-chain to improve our system.

You are welcome at any level: engineer, QA, QAE, SRE, DevOps, PO, PM at any level of seniority, from CIO, CTO, head of, lead, manager, junior to staff engineer.

What matters is to improve with Quality Engineering.

What to expect from Quality Engineering or Die Trying

Quality Engineering aims to provide actionable content to deliver Quality at Speed through blogs, interviews, ebooks, etc. 

Right now the content is not well concentrated, reflecting the lack of transversality and harmonization of our practices.

I am trying to contribute with the QE Unit.

QE Unit is the Quality Engineering Community providing various contents from community sharing.

You can also access:

  • A weekly update of Quality Engineering with exclusive content crafted, compiled and summarized from various sources;
  • Early access to private round-table, events, surveys and other community collaboration opportunities;
  • Co-construction of the Quality Engineering Framework, MAMOS.

You only need to join.

How to live by Quality Engineering or Die Trying

The QE Unit provides a main site concentrating the different contents.

What you can do to live by Quality Engineering:

  1. Follow the QE Unit to get your ebook and get introduced to the community
  2. Join the QE Unit to officially be part of the community
  3. Share the QE Unit with with peers.

From now on, my motto is “Quality Engineering or Die Trying”.

The Retail Experience by 2023

The retail industry changes drastically and fast.

Retailers are facing stiff competition from online retail giants like Amazon, and traditional brick-and-mortar retail stores are struggling to maintain their relevance. 

The technology convergence significantly impacts the future of retail, disrupting what we know today as retail digitalization.

Macro Trends For The Future of Retail

Retail will undergo further consolidation as more retail stores close their doors permanently. We already see retail stores opening up their retail space to other businesses, like stores-within-a-stores.

Traditional retail business models are being rapidly disrupted by technology innovation with automation and Artificial Intelligence (AI), leveraging the Cloud and Big Data.

The new wave of converging technology will disrupt that landscape.

More retail brands and channels will disappear, including physical retail outlets, online storefronts, mobile shopping apps, catalogs. New experiences will be available to the upcoming 8 billion worldwide population, living mainly in cities.

The players that will thrive require reinventing their business model, generating value from the technology opportunities and massive amounts of data from their stores, customers, media, products and transactions.

1. Retail Experience will be individually AI-driven

Retailers can already use AI with machine learning to improve customer experiences, recommendations, product offerings, forecast demand and optimize their inventory.

Artificial intelligence aims to automate complex decision-matrices at scales overcoming the power of multiple human brains. It consists of algorithms running on large data sets to produce models that ideally self-improve over time. 

While AI is maturing for simpler deployments, Quantum Computing is coming.

Figure 1: The AI process is similar for Cloud and Quantum Computing, just x100 times faster. Google Cloud.

Imagine what you could do if you were 100 times faster with multi-tasking capabilities. Quantum Computing will bring that processing power, unlocking a wave of opportunities for companies to use their data.

A personal AI assistant will know you better than you do, suggesting hyper-personalized products and services based on your personality, activity, ongoing and upcoming life events. Forget the hours of endless scrolling.

You will also let your AI interact on your behalf for buying or contacting customer support with the AI-chatbot of stores, getting to an agreement together for delivering you a present when you will be at home.

2. Retail Operations will be IoT-driven

We start to be familiar with devices in our day-to-day lives. We talk to Alexa, Google Home and our car. This entire fleet of connected devices is constantly collecting data to improve the customer experience and internal operations.

Internet of Things (IoT) will be implemented more widely across retail businesses as technology becomes smaller, cheaper and faster. Retailers will track and react to customer behaviors across all channels (in-store, online, mobile). 

These connected devices will disrupt the current retail landscape: “cashier-less stores” with no human vendors, automatically managing reorder, automated warehouse management, or drones delivery.

Figure 2: IoT in retail use cases, euristiq.

Additionally, retail operations will improve their efficiency using Robots.

The convergence of AI & Quantum computing will allow retail stores and warehouses to carry out inventory management with much greater accuracy because it can simultaneously store and work with data on a massive scale.

Retailers will leverage entire fleets of Robots supported by decentralized computing— known as Edge computing — to perform intelligent operations on the field.

3. Retail Products Will Be Printed For You

The current retail digitalization focuses on selling existing products and services through web, mobile, and IoT channels. Behind the scenes, transportation and shipping remain a necessity, with the only option to optimize them.

3D Printing will play a role in the retail landscape becoming mainstream. For example, Adidas has announced that they will be using Additive Manufacturing to produce small runs of sneakers on-demand in retail stores.

The challenge of instantaneous printing in stores will replace the one of 24-hour delivery. With the technology maturation and price reduction, the next step is to directly print products at your home, accessing samples if needed.

Figure 3: In-store 3D printing available at Best Buy, RetailCustomerExperience.

3D Printing will impact the entire value chain.

The supply chain is doomed to a significant shift with fewer products to manufacture, store and ship. It means considerable waste reductions to accelerate the product lifecycle for more user-designed and natively tailored-made products. 

End of the struggle when you size between an S and M, or struggle in using an online size guide.

4. Retail Products Will Be Embedded & Adaptive

We have access to a wide range of materials, from clothing in cotton or cashmere to furniture in a whole set of metals, woods, etc. Their common characteristic is to be static: they are made of basic materials and do not change over time.

The rise of 3D Printing with smaller connected IoT devices will accelerate the apparition of new materials and nanotechnology. Businesses will no longer be constrained by the limitations of retail or manufacturing.

New materials mean more flexible and lighter products with reactive capabilities, such as windows with self-cleaning, transports will self-repairing, among other opportunities.

Figure 4: A Polar Team Pro Shift providing sport data, Fashion Retail.

Products will also become more intelligent.

Nanotechnology will accelerate the deployment of sensors in existing and newly created materials. Expect to have a t-shirt with a tailored-made sizing, heart sensor and sweat reduction based on your body composition and activity.

These combined trends will accelerate the rate of new products apparition with a much shorter lifecycle. 3D-printed nanotechnology can be tested and tweaked at the nanoscale level much more quickly than the macroscale.

5. Retail Shops Will Be Augmented Anywhere

We have become used to virtual shopping through web stores or mobile applications. Some of us are also familiar with buying immaterial goods and services like e-gift cards or e-gaming.

Mature Augmented Reality will bring a whole set of increased experiences supported by the increasing number of devices, networks such as 5G & satellites. It will be more than playing Pokemon Go with our phone.

Combined with nanotechnology, AR will accelerate its deployment.

Figure 5: In-store virtual try-on with augmented reality, Retail Information Systems.

Imagine having access to augmented lenses. When entering a shop, you see additional information displayed over the product you are looking at: its price, materials, 3D Printing time, and AI personalized recommendations.

You can decide to start printing it at your home without talking to any vendors.

When leaving, you discover that you forget to deactivate your “privacy data shield”- too late -the shop already tracked everything you did with all the sensors there. Yes, retailers will use every available data to capture opportunities.

6. Retail Shops Will Be Virtually Immersive

Virtual Reality creates immersive digital worlds leveraging existing computing capabilities and better devices like VR headsets (e.g. Oculus). The advanced simulators once reserved to the army will become mainstream.

Second Life is a game that represents the concept of Metaverse: a virtual world where you can develop an identity with a wide range of activities. The difference is to start creating these worlds as an extension of your life for most people.

Some key figures to have in mind:

Imagine: it’s 7 a.m; you are not motivated to take autonomous transportation to work. You jump in your VR headset right to your virtual office, chat with colleagues until instantly teleport to your first meeting at 8 a.m.

Figure 6: Your virtual office would be similar to this one, Facebook Metaverse.

You decide to call your parents at night with a virtual reality call (i.e. no more Whatsapp calls) and take a break on a distant island. With all the sensors and devices, the experience feels very real. Why even travel so much?

The advent of these virtual worlds creates a whole new space of interactions – virtual shopping malls, brand stores, work – and advertising. You will have other places to look than Google Search, the existing social media and ads on your smartphone.

You will also start buying more virtual and immaterial products; your avatar has more style with these latest branded sneakers.

7. Retail Transactions Will Be Decentralized & Immaterial

Digitalization accelerated the selling of virtual products like ebooks or virtual planners, usually sold by large actors offering a wide range of products, services and payment options.

You don’t want to remove your VR headset to buy a t-shirt for your avatar; you will use the retail shops present in the virtual world. Once you complete the transaction, how can you ensure its integrity and originality from the brand?

Smart contracts is a technology supported by Blockchain for decentralized ledger and trust store. It is a secured record of transactions that will ensure your product origin, validity, and store your payment transaction history.

Talking about payments: forget about your cash and part of your credit cards.

Figure 7: The possibilities of Blockchain with converging technology, Dreamstime.

Blockchain emerged from the development of decentralized currencies (think Bitcoin) as a means of trade without middle-man authorities (i.e. no central banks authority, commissions, power).

This decentralized transactional and trust capacity is powering the development of NFTs (“non-fungible tokens”), creating the Web3 of tomorrow: cryptocurrencies, unique immaterial items, smart contracts for everything.

Retailers will require to support these transactional capacities, offering trusted products and services, and fighting to stay relevant in this more decentralized, individual and virtual world. 

What Upcoming Challenges for Retailers?

Converging technology will transform the future of Retail from new customer experiences, automated operations, products, transactions to the reinvention of the supply chain.

It is hard to predict the tipping point of these combined evolutions. Strategic planning performed at various time horizons can help prepare organizations for such changes. 

In the short term, companies have to streamline their operations on their unique value proposition, aligning today’s user experience with their business architecture, organization, and technology foundations. 

Their transformation must secure a business capability to generate data, connect with partners, and evolve quickly. This always-on connectivity will enable to develop business opportunities supported by the emerging technology convergence.

Retailers have to reflect on their value proposition in the long term and how they can leverage converging technologies. The company’s purpose, offers and values are the most stable foundations in an accelerated and uncertain ecosystem.

Why not start to sell NFTs for virtual clothing of avatars? Which type of existing or new products would make sense in 3D printing? Which ready-to-use AI model can you leverage to make the difference in your customer journey?

“The best way to predict the future is to create it.”

-Alan Kay

References

Peter H. Diamantis, Steven Kotler, The Future Is Faster Than You Think: How Converging Technologies Are Transforming Business, Industries, and Our Lives. Simon & Schuster.

Mauro F. Guillen, 2030: How Today’s Biggest Trends Will Collide and Reshape the Future of Everything. St. Martin’s Press

Marco Iansiti, Karim R. Lakhani, Competing in the Age of AI: Strategy and Leadership When Algorithms and Networks Run the World. Harvard Business Review Press.