BrowserStack raises $200 mn Series B round at $4 bn valuation

The value of foreign currency assets with the central bank stood at $560.89 billion, while that of gold reserves was $37.6 billion.

Software testing platform BrowserStack has closed a $200 million Series B funding round at a valuation of $4 Billion, led by Mary Meeker's BOND, with participation from Insight Partners and existing investor Accel.

BrowserStack, which is profitable since inception, provides software testing on the cloud, with over 50,000 customers and 4 million developer signups. It will use the investment to make strategic acquisitions, expand product offerings and fund growth. Its customers include Google, Amazon, Microsoft, Twitter, Tesco, IKEA, Spotify, Expedia, and Trivago.

Jay Simons, a general partner at BOND said testing software across an expanding number of browsers and devices is a huge and expensive challenge for development teams to manage on their own.

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"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" Simons said in a press note.

"We will continue to scale rapidly across functions to accelerate the rate at which we take new products to market. This funding will allow us to explore the different ways in which we can bring new products to market - via acquisitions, via acqui-hires, or by investing more heavily in our Product and Engineering teams," said Ritesh Arora, co-founder, and CEO of BrowserStack.

In the last three years, BrowserStack has more than tripled its employee base to 750+ across seven countries and opened ten new data centers worldwide.

The BrowserStack deal also underscores the increasing appetite for SaaS (software as a service) among investors. Over the last year, SaaS IPOs in the US have performed spectacularly, with listings of Snowflake, Zoom, Cloudflare and Palantir sparking a new wave of enthusiasm from venture capitalists, private equity funds and hedge funds.

The Covid19 pandemic too has boosted digital adoption, as upgrading doftware or switching to a cloud solution has now become critical. Other Indian SaaS startups who have become unicorns include Freshworks, Chargebee, Druva, Icertis, Postman and Zenoti.

Interestingly, BrowserStack which was founded in 2011, was bootstrapped for 7 years, raising $50 Million in Series A from Accel in 2018.

In a blog announcing the investment, Accel's investors said they courted the startup's founders for 6 years before they finally agreed to bring an investor on board.

"Though we tried to invest after that first meeting, it wasn’t until today—6 years later as a profitable company with tens of thousands of paying customers worldwide and lots of coffees, international flights, Mumbai summer rainstorms, and meetings with nearly every member of our investment team—that we’re fortunate enough to partner with the BrowserStack team for this next phase of its growth," Accel's Shekhar Kirani,Nate Niparko and Ryan Sweeny said in a blog published in January, 2018.