Testlio Raises $1M To Provide On-Demand QA Testers

Testlio

Testlio, a startup that provides development teams with dedicated quality-assurance testers, has recently raised $1 million in seed funding to bring on more experts to fill out its “elastic” on-demand offering.

Instead of hiring a team of QA engineers to deal with the bugs produced in new versions of an app or service, Testlio lets you sign up to have a dedicated team of their own vetted testers check in regularly with test reports that sync up with your development schedule.

Using its own test plan management system, Testlio assigns an account manager and test lead to your startup to build out a process for testing that enables them to reach every platform you’re working with at a pace that lets your developers see test reports in time to work that information into new development plans — typically on a weekly basis.

Once a plan has been laid out, the test lead can adjust the number of testers she needs on a developer’s case in order to get through the necessary work on time. This means that right before  a major product launch, your QA team can scale up to handle all the changes on iPhone and Android, while also not forcing you to keep paying for an entire staff when you just need one person to check some minor changes to the web app during a slow week.

Since you can keep a dedicated team member on board throughout, those who do help temporarily will have guidance from someone who’s built a longer-term relationship with your developers. In a way, it could be seen as a complement to services like Rainforest, which lets you send off routine testing tasks to people with the basic skill set to do the job. By using Rainforest and Testlio together, you could have the Testlio lead figure out which jobs are appropriate to be sent off and what needs a look from an expert who can suss out oddities that only someone familiar with your app would recognize.

Testlio founder and CEO Kristel Viidik says her company currently regularly works with 100-200 QA testers, though “thousands” have signed up to go through the startup’s strict verification process. With only 10 permanent team members of its own, the startup is looking to expand to accommodate more testers and more clients, building up from a base that includes Acompli, which Microsoft acquired back in December to build the new Outlook for iOS.

Funding for Testlio’s over-subscribed seed round came from Techstars VenturesGalvanize, Yee Lee, Pat Matthews, Lew Moorman and Carman Chan.