BrowserStack is the latest addition to India's unicorn club
BrowserStack is the latest addition to India's unicorn club
The SaaS startup has raised $200 million in Series B funding at a $4 billion valuation.
Raising $200 million in Series B funding at a $4 billion valuation, web and mobile app testing platform BrowserStack became India’s highest-valued software-as-a-service (SaaS) startup last week.
The startup’s valuation has reportedly increased eight times in the past three years and the employee base has more than tripled to reach over 750.
With the latest round of funding – led by Bond Capital with participation from Insight Partners and Accel – the homegrown company also became India’s 15th unicorn of the year. Existing investor Accel had earlier made a $50 million Series A investment in January 2018.
The capital, the company said, will support the startup’s strategic acquisitions, accelerate product innovation, and help scale up its product and engineering teams.
Launched in 2011 in a coffee shop by co-founders Nakul Aggarwal and Ritesh Arora, BrowserStack today has data centres in 15 locations globally. Bootstrapped since its inception and remaining so for seven years before seeking external fundings, the startup now boasts over 50,000 customers in 135 countries – including the likes of Google, Amazon, Microsoft, and Twitter – and over 4 million developer signups.
Arora, who is also the CEO of BrowserStack, stated in a release: “We are going to double-down on solving new developer problems in the space of DevOps testing.”
India’s SaaS ecosystem
The Mumbai- and San Francisco-based firm BrowserStack has become the latest SaaS startup to enter the coveted unicorn club, joining the likes of Freshworks, Icertis, Druva, Postman, Zenoti, and ChargeBee.
Funding in the Indian SaaS ecosystem, a Tech Circle report stated, has seen a major bump in the past decade with year-on-year investments rising from $70 million in 2010 to $1.8 billion in 2020.
Global investors like Tiger Global, Insight Partners, and SoftBank have taken note of the sector’s ‘build in India for the world model,’ according to an Economic Times report. The Covid-19 pandemic has further fuelled digitisation, which has benefitted the country’s software product companies allowing them to build and sell globally.
With organisations moving to remote work due to the pandemic, “a large number of companies [are] looking at cloud solutions to replace their on-premise infrastructure. They are going through rapid digital adoption and are moving key systems, tools and processes to the cloud,” Arora told YourStory. This, he added, led to a notable rise in BrowserStack’s manual testing products.
Amanat Khullar is the Content and Editorial Manager at ADIF.
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