Automated Software Testers Attract VC Funds
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Automated software testing is gaining momentum as enterprises look to accelerate DevOps by moving beyond manual steps such as scripting of code. The added agility is seen as another way of getting distributed applications out the door faster while scaling DevOps.
As automated software testing takes off, with the global market expected to reach an estimated $34 billion this year, continuous testing specialist Tricentis, based in Vienna, Austria, said this week it has raised a hefty $165 million. Insight Venture Partners led the Series B funding round.
The funds will be used to expand access to its Tosca automated testing suite, the company said Monday (Jan. 23). The investments follow several other large funding announcements over the last six months.
The company, which also has offices in Los Altos, Calif., said its approach addresses "highly-accelerated development cycles and, at the same time, [provides] a strict accounting for the business risks associated with rapid, iterative code changes,” according to Tricentis CEO Sandeep Johri.
Johri is a former vice president at Hewlett Packard. Oracle (NYSE: ORCL) and VMware (NYSE: VMW) acquired Johri's previous startups. Tricentis has so far raised at least $174 since 2012. The startup said it is seeking to wrest the software testing market from Hewlett Packard Enterprise (NYSE: HPE) and IBM (NYSE: IBM) as they move away from DevOps tools.
The company claims its customers have achieved software testing automation rates of more than 90 percent using its Tosca tool suite, which it touts as delivering a ten-fold boost test-automation efficiency compared to tools using manual scripting. The tool set is designed to provide "continuous testing," a technique that scans code to provide instantaneous feedback on each software release.
Tricentis and other automated software testing specialists are betting more enterprises will abandon time-consuming monolithic software testing in favor of automation tools that will speed debugging and improve overall software quality. The startup claims more than 400 customers, including automakers BMW (ETR: BMW) and Toyota (NYSE: TM) along with financial services giants such as Allianz (ETR: ALV), Deutsche Bank (NYSE: DB) and UBS (NYSE: UBS).
Software giant Infosys (NYSE: INFY), a Tricentis partner, notes that automated software testing is gaining traction as enterprises seek to move beyond traditional software quality assurance to "quality engineering" as testing is scaled to meet demand of more business application software.
According to the web site VentureBeat.com, several other automated software-testing startups have attracted sizeable investments over the last year, including San Francisco-based Sauce Labs, which recently closed a $70 million funding round.
