BrowserStack has helped millions of developers accelerate and automate their tests, bringing testing closer to writing code; now it wants to become the go-to testing infrastructure for the internet of the future
By the time BrowserStack did a Series A in 2018—$50 million straightaway, from just Accel—it was a profitable venture with some of the world’s biggest companies as customers using its browser-testing product. The company was the result of founders Ritesh Arora and Nakul Aggarwal’s experience with testing code, which the serial entrepreneurs had done in their previous ventures and didn’t want to, again. The IIT-Bombay graduates had hit upon a problem to solve that was so relevant that they’d become profitable within the first six months of starting the company in Mumbai in 2011. They had worked for four months to build a beta version of BrowserStack, a cross-browser and app testing platform—starting with tests for Microsoft’s Internet Explorer. When they got 10,000 beta users in the ensuing few months, they launched the commercial version. By the time the Series A happened, six years later, BrowserStack had four products being used by customers in 135 countries, including the likes of Walt Disney, Tesco, Microsoft, Facebook, Twitter, Airbnb and Virgin Pulse. Today, “we have over a million developers who probably would be using our products on an annual basis globally, and they would be a part of over 55,000 paying customers”, says Arora, who is the CEO. “We are way over $100 million and continue to grow very well,” he says, adding that the company will cross the $200 million annual recurring revenue mark this year. And BrowserStack remains profitable, he emphasises. “What we really want to be is the cloud testing infrastructure for the internet,” says Arora. There is a rapid transformation happening and more than half of the global economy in the next 10 years will be digital. “So how can we be the testing infrastructure for the new digital economy that’s getting created? That’s where we want to be.” To make that happen, BrowserStack’s customers expect it to provide them many more products to help them solve ever more complex use cases around testing. In parallel, the company is investing heavily in its go-to-market efforts, expanding its reach, and further improving its customer service. In June 2021, the company raised $200 million in an investment led by Bond Capital, with participation from Insight Partners, a US-based firm that’s also an investor in Twitter, Shopify and Udemy, and Accel India. The transaction valued BrowserStack at $4 billion.
(This story appears in the 20 May, 2022 issue of Forbes India. To visit our Archives, click here.)