You say Seed round, we say Series A.
BugBuster, a startup spun out of the Operating Systems Laboratory at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (EPFL), has raised just over $1 million in what’s being described as a Series A round — such is the state of available funding in some parts of Europe. This adds to the $1 million previously raised by the company since it was founded in 2011.
The investment, from a consortium of angels (BAS and Go Beyond), and previous backers Polytech Ventures, and Hasler Foundation, will be used by BugBuster to bring its cloud-based automated bug detection software for Web apps to market following the completion of Beta testing this month, and for further development.
Competing with the likes of Selenium and WebDriver, the Lausanne, Switzerland-based startup offers developers a cloud-based solution for automated testing of the front-end code driving their Web apps — currently supporting HTML5 and Javascript.
Because it’s cloud-based, at its most basic, you enter the URL of your Web app, from which BugBuster will automatically explore your app and execute its code, find and report any bugs, and generate screenshots and precise debugging information.
In addition, the SaaS offers an API so that you can specify the business rules of your application and direct BugBuster, giving you control of where and how your application is tested. This includes the ability to track “goals” to ensure your application does what it’s supposed to do, and “watchers” to monitor the state of your application and react accordingly.
I’m told that the service has been in Beta since June and has around 400 companies currently testing it. During this period, BugBuster says that bugs were detected in 89% of all applications tested. Now if only somebody could write an app to automatically fix them, too.