BrowserStack- App and Browser testing SaaS Unicorn in India!

The SaaS (Software-as-a-Service) has been the talk of the town for a while now. And, if you know a thing about soft wares, SaaS is regarded as the most trending & popular business technology these days. Most of such SaaS soft wares work on a subscription-based model. These soft wares are built by various start-ups who then offer these on B2B models to various business industries such as HR, banking & finance, insurance, healthcare, etc., and what not?

However, to reach a wider audience it becomes necessary to test & check that this software functions effectively on various platforms, browsers, and devices through testing of software on every platform by developers which is again a long, tedious &time-consuming for developers. This is where the role of SaaS start-up businesses like BrowserStack comes into play.

BrowserStack is an Indian cloud web and mobile testing platform that offers developers & web designers run testing on their websites and mobile applications across browsers, operating systems, and real mobile devices. From its first business headquarters in Mumbai, India BrowserStack has its presence across 135 nations in the world with its global offices in Dublin, San Francisco, New York, and Atlanta.

With an employee strength between 950+ employees, it boasts of top clients like- Microsoft, Twitter, Barclays, Expedia, and several others, powering 60mn+ tests across its 15 global data centers that run 3000+ on devices & browsers. BrowserStack secured a $200 million investment in Series B funding at a $4 billion valuation that made it the 15th enter into the list of start-up unicorns of the year 2021 and the second SaaS unicorn after Charge bee, which achieved it in April 2021. On August 10, 2021, Forbes 2021 named BrowserStack in its list of top 100 private cloud companies in the world, where the judging panel consisted of 34 CEOs from public cloud companies from all over the world.

BrowserStack- Start-up Story

Ritesh Arora & Nakul Aggarwal were good friends and classmates during their graduation from IIT Bombay. While the founders were trying to website development of Downcase, a consulting start-up venture they struggled to test what they were trying to build across a range of devices & browsers. Hence, to resolve this issue, they built a software testing platform starting with Internet Explorer, which they named BrowserStack in 2011.

BrowserStack has been started with a mission to “empower developers to build amazing experiences” to build easy, quick and quality software testing tools to offer an ultimate flawless experience to billions of users and aspires to become the ‘ Testing Infrastructure of the Internet. With its ever-growing list of customers and services, the start-up is already claimed to be leading the software testing industry.

BrowserStack–Founders & Team

The co-founders met each other while studying for their graduate program at IIT Bombay and finally co-founded BrowserStack in 2011. While Ritesh Arora also serves as the CEO of BrowserStack, Nakul Aggarwal on the other hand serves as the CTO (Chief Technology Officer) of the company.

Interestingly, both of them are not first-time entrepreneurs but ‘Serial Entrepreneurs” who mutually co-founded three start-up tech- ventures, namely QuarkRank, QuarkBase, and Downcase, before co-founding BrowserStack. Let’s find out a little more about them & their journey to BrowserStack-

Ritesh Arora

Ritesh Arora, Co-Founder &CEO of BrowserStack completed his graduation in Computer Science from the Indian Institute of Technology, Bombay. After completing his education he worked as a Software Developer in Lime Labs LLC, a USA-based web services platform.

Curious by nature & a natural problem solver, Ritesh drives the strategic vision and direction of the company. Under his able leadership, BrowserStack has become the world’s leading software testing platform and has supported businesses like Tesco, Shell, NVIDIA, Discovery, Wells Fargo, etc. among other 50,000 other global customers deliver quality software.

Having realized a globally unsolved need for cross-platform testing during one of his entrepreneurial stints, he co-founded BrowserStack in 2011 that led the business to become a globally recognized SaaS start-up that went on to win several awards & accolades such as Forbes Cloud 100, LinkedIn’s Top 25 Startups in India, and Bootstrap Champ by Economic Times. Furthermore, Ritesh has been named “One of Wealthiest Self-Made Entrepreneurs under 40” by Hurun India in 2021.

Nakul Aggarwal

Nakul Aggarwal, the CTO & Co-Founder of BrowserStack, has completed his graduation in computer science from the Indian Institute of Technology, Bombay. After that, he worked as a Software Developer at Lime Spot Technology India Pvt. Ltd. for 2 years and as a senior software Engineer in Lime Labs LLC, before co-founding BrowserStack in 2011.

Being the Chief Technological Officer at BrowserStack, Nakul focused on building an efficient testing infrastructure for the internet that could empower developers to deliver remarkableresults. He also handled the business development & scaling of the platform helping it to run more than 60 million tests per day with 15 global data centers for 5 million registered developer sign-ups.

Nakul Aggarwal is known to lead by example and has embedded a work ethics culture while working across teams. His deep &intrinsic understanding of the developer ecosystem has helped BrowserStack to develop a customer-centric culture and build outstanding products.

Before co-founding BrowserStack with Ritesh Arora in 2011, he also founded QuarkRank which was one of the first AI-powered sentiment engines secondly, QuarkBase, at that time stood among the top 8,000 websites by traffic globally at the time and thirdly, Downcase was a consulting company for Indian as well as global clients.

BrowserStack- Core Team

Other than the Co-founders, the core team comprises –

• David Jones,
• Vivian Kristopher,
• Vineeta Vishwanath,
• Mukund Srinivasan,
• Surbhi Sopori,
• Abhishek De,
• Lindsay Cade,
• Neil Joglekar,
• Manasi Bhide,
• Ganeshram Mahalingam,
• Sahil Maniar,
• Dhairya Kothari &
• Jay Dave.

BrowserStack- The following member is on the board of BrowserStack management-

• Ritesh Arora, Director (CEO &Co-Founder)
• Nakul Aggarwal, Director ( CTO &Co-Founder)
• Shekhar Kirani, Director
• Ryan Sweeney, Director
• Jeff Seibert, etc.

BrowserStack- Business & Revenue Model

BrowserStack works on a B2B & B2C model by offering cross-browser testing services based on subscription plans & programs. Any Web/App designer and developer could use the platform to evaluate the quality and functionality of their software by testing their internal servers. Its standard features consist of mobile emulators for iOS and Android to allow testing across a range of devices, pre-installed developer tools for testing and debugging, multi-OS support, etc.

BrowserStack also runs the software through multiple combinations of devices and browsers to test for any bugs, malfunctions, or glitches in the software and prevent them through their five products for the users to choose from that offer a seamless experience to the end-users.

The subscription plans offered through the BrowStacker platform help it primarily generates revenues. Each product offered through the platform has separate pricing depending upon the customer requirements, but the customers could also take a free trial with limited services and even subscribe to plans with a 25% discount on the annual purchase of each product. Besides in the year 2020, BrowserStack also generated additional revenues of ₹44 Lakhs through interests and ₹77 lakhs through foreign exchanges fluctuations in the financial year 2020

BrowserStack performs testing of apps and websites through the primary tools which have been briefly described along with their subscription plans as provided below-

BrowserStack- Funding & Acquisitions

To date, BrowserStack has raised a total sum of $250million over Series A& Series B funding in two rounds from investors like Accel, Insight Partners, and the Silicon Valley investor Mary Meeker’s Bond Capital. In June 2020, this SaaS start-up declared its commendable achievement of securing $200 million at a valuation of $4 bn from a joint investment made by Accel, Insight Partners, and Bond, which also helped it to enter the start-up unicorn club making it the 15th start-up to make it to the list and one of the most valuable SaaS company in India that overtook Freshworks which was gearing up for its public debut on the stock exchange at that time.

On 9th July 2020, BrowserStack also announced the acquisition of a testing platform based in San Francisco, named Percy for an undisclosed amount and acquired another leading open-source test automation frameworkNightwatch.js which offers an end-to-end test automation framework and is hailed as one of the fastest-growing Selenium-based tools with 1 million monthly npm installs and over 10.5k GitHub stars, which it announced in Dec 2021.

In Sept 2021, BrowserStack also announced a major buy-back of its ESOPs worth $50 million (about Rs 365 crore), as part of its efforts to support employees in their journey of wealth creation.

With the funding, BrowserStack plans to become the largest testing platform by acquiring a 50% market share in the world. According to an interview given by BrowserStack Co-founder and CEO, to YourStory, he stated: “This new funding would help us to explore the different ways in which the business could bring new & innovative products through acquisitions, acqui-hires, and by putting more investments in the product development &engineering teams.”

Browser Stack- Growth Over years

In 2011, when the co-founders Ritesh Arora and Nakul Aggarwal decided to launch a website for their tech consulting business, Downcase. Though the website was built within two days however things became challenging when Ritesh started testing the website for compatibility across different devices, operating systems, and browsers, the process was long, tedious, and slowing them down, with no immediate solution available for the problem. On quick research, they found that they were not alone in facing such a problem and the problem with cross-compatibility testing was universal. This is when the idea of creating a testing platform took birth.

Since its inception, BrowserStack went on to achieve tremendous success with a profitable business for ten years now and the legacy that continues till today. The business achieved its first milestone of 1000 customers within six months of its launch and 50 employees after two years in 2014. Slowly & steadily, they continued to work on their services and added new features mobile testing service for Android and iOS in 2015 and tools like Automate in 2017.

By 2016, BrowserStack was already expanding its international presence through the launch of the global device cloud and the introduction of new products like App Live & App Automate. In 2018, this SaaS start-up bagged its first round of investment worth $50M from Accel.

By 2020, it had expanded its business internationally by establishing offices in San Francisco and Dublin along with 15 Global Data Centres so far, widening its operational reach around the world. In the same year, they acquired Percy and reached their breakeven.

Though profits started pouring into the business from its first day itself, it took 7 years for the start-up to reach a revenue of $20 Million whereas, it was quick to reach $100 Million within the next couple of years. For years, the business ran on bootstrapped funds till 2021, when it received a $200M investment from Bond, Accel & Insight Partners in Series B Funding round that made it a $4bn SaaS unicorn Start-up.

Like any other SaaS start-up, BrowserStack also benefited from the rapidly-paced expansion of the cross-border SaaS opportunities and attained even higher acceleration during the pandemic by unchallenging for start-ups to build and sell services across the globe through digital mediums across sectors. In 2021 itself, it became 800+ employees globally and officially a remote-first business to take such initiative in the COVID pandemic and acquired Nightwatch.js, a leading open-source test automation framework that was announced in Dec 2021.

The Co-Founder & CEO Ritesh while elaborating the situation stated”COVID-19 has forced every single organization to look for remote working options globally, which in turn led to several companies to look for cloud solutions to replace their premise infrastructure. These businesses were going through rapid digital adoption and are moving key systems, tools, and processes to the cloud. And for this reason, we observed a significant uptick in our manual testing products.”

As per the Venture Intelligence data, the valuations of BrowserStack have been appreciated 8 times in the last 3 years. Despite its tremendous growth, BrowserStack remains firmly committed to a product-first approach while attributing the developer community as its biggest growth driver Browser Stack’s future is one of rapid growth and scale. Software is shaping lives globally, and our products massively impact the quality of software.

Currently, 5 billion active users are accessing the internet through 3000+ devices and browsers in 21 different operating systems, and 8 major browser engines. Regardless of whether a company is big or small, they need to ensure that their websites and applications render as intended so that the ultimate customer gets a smooth user experience.

BrowserStack – Awards and Achievements

Apart from being twice named as one of the “Top 100 private cloud companies” by Forbes, here are some other awards & accolades bagged by this SaaS unicorn-

• Forbes Cloud 100 (in 2018) and Forbes Cloud 100 (2021)
• Bootstrap Champ in the year 2015 by Economic Times Startup Awards.
• Leader in the Test Automation Software category (2021) by G2.
• Top 25 most attractive Startups in India (2018) by LinkedIn.

Browser Stack- Key Competitors in Industry

To date, there are fewer SaaS start-ups that could match with BrowserStack in terms of stability, support, and meeting the requirements of customers, and the names include-

1. Sauce Labs
2. TestComplete
3. LambdaTest
4. Browserling
5. RobusTest

BrowserStack- What lies ahead for the future?

A recent report released by Bain & Company revealed that the “Indian SaaS start-ups have the potential to capture a 7-9% share of the global SaaS market with a combined revenue generation of $18bn to $20bn within the same timeline by Indian SaaS start-ups.

Accordingly, in the coming years, BrowserStack is expected to increase its talent pool by hiring more employees globally and employ its resources in making strategic acquisitions, and expand its product offerings and their presence around the globe.

Ritesh Arora, co-founder, and chief executive of BrowserStack, while expressing his thoughts on the matter stated”Our vision is to be the testing infrastructure for the internet. This means launching new products which solve deep problems for developers in the space of testing. This funding will allow us to explore the different ways in which we can bring new products to market — via acquisitions, acqui-hires, and by investing more heavily in our product and engineering teams. Our focus will always be to build products that solve deep problems for developers and help them build amazing experiences for their users to fulfill its vision of becoming the “testing infrastructure for the internet”.