India-founded SaaS start-up BrowserStack raises $200m

The round – which also features Insight Venture Partners and Accel Partners – values the company at $4 billion, according to a statement. Accel provided the $50 million Series A in 2018.

BrowserStack has now become India's most valuable software-as-a-service (SaaS) property, surpassing Freshworks, which raised $150 million at a valuation of $3.5 billion in 2019 and is now reportedly preparing for an IPO. In confirming its unicorn status, BrowserStack sits alongside India-founded peers such as Icertis, Druva, Postman, Zenoti, ChargeBee, and Zeta.

Postman and Zenoti saw their valuations surpass $1 billion in 2020, while ChargeBee and Zeta joined the club in the past two months. This activity corresponds to the global SaaS boom, which is to some extent pandemic-driven and largely led by the US. Indian players tend to be either established in the US by local entrepreneurs or relocate there to be closer to customers.

BrowserStack was founded in 2011 by Ritesh Arora and Nakul Aggarwal, who met while studying computer science at the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) in Mumbai. It was their fourth start-up and born out of frustrations linked to the third, specifically an inability to test what they were building across a range of devices and browsers.

With offices in Dublin, San Francisco, New York, and Mumbai, BrowserStack now serves a 50,000-strong customer base, including Google, Amazon, Microsoft, Twitter, Tesco, Ikea, Spotify, and Expedia. It claims to power over two million tests every day across 15 global data centers, offering access to more than 2,000 real mobile devices and browsers via a cloud platform.

In the last three years, the company more than tripled its headcount to 750 and opened 10 new data centers. Further expansion will embrace the increasingly complex testing burden of development and IT operations (DevOps), characterized by the addition of new classes of devices and operating systems. There is also a need to test for new use cases like accessibility, visual correctness, and security.

Arora said that BrowserStack would "double down on solving new developer problems in the space of DevOps testing," pointing to the recent acquisition of visual testing platform Percy as just the beginning. The goal to accelerate the rate at which new products are taken to market through a combination of M&A and investment in product and engineering teams.

"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," said Jay Simons, a general partner at Bond.

"BrowserStack makes this simple and cost-effective, giving developers instant access to the widest range of browser and device configurations to test their applications."

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• Topics
• South Asia
• North America
• Expansion
• Technology
• India
• USA
• Bond Capital
• Accel Partners
• Insight Venture Partners
• SaaS
• enterprise software