Web developers have to run hundreds of tasks and they are able to do so on their own machines. But when a developer firm — at a scale — has to perform similar activities, they don’t often have — and in many cases, want to have — the required computing power at their disposal to run such tasks locally.
“Can we build a platform that helps these developers and their firms save a ton of time — bringing down what would otherwise take four to five hours to 10 minutes?” says Asad Khan.
Khan has spent a decade attempting to solve this problem. And at his most recent venture, LambdaTest, he has productized the solution.
The four-year-old startup’s cloud-based offerings allow users to test their websites and apps on more than 3,000 different combinations of browsers, operating systems, devices and different variants of them.
“We have built AWS for testers,” he said in an interview with TechCrunch. “We are not a testing tool company, but an enabler of an ecosystem where developers can run all kinds of tests written in any language or framework. The platform enables you to run your tasks at any scale from anywhere at any time.”
And as is often the case with a fast-growing startup, LambdaTest’s efficiency has drawn interest from investors.
On Tuesday, the startup said it has raised $45 million in its Series C financing round led by Premji Invest. Existing investors Sequoia Capital India, Telstra Ventures, Blume Ventures, Leo Capital as well as Sandeep Johri, former chief executive of software testing firm Tricentis, also participated in the round, bringing the startup’s all-time funding to $70 million.
LambdaTest says over 500 enterprises and a million developers and testers across 130 nations are using its platform. The firm has helped them run more than 100 million tests, achieve 95% quicker time-to-market, increase their release productivity by 62% and identify 67% of issues prior to launch, the startup said. On its website, LambdaTest counts Microsoft, Apple, Xerox, Postman, Yale and Directi among its customers.
Khan said the pandemic also played a key role in persuading many potential customers to explore LambdaTest. The startup grew its business by 300% last year, he said.
“We are razor-focused on making the lives of developers and QA teams easier when it comes to test orchestration and execution. Over the past few months, we’ve released HyperExecute, a next-gen smart test orchestration platform to help businesses run end-to-end automation tests at the fastest speed possible. We will soon be launching our test intelligence platform Test-at-Scale (TAS). It is already in beta. We are also continuously enhancing our core execution platform’s capabilities,” said Khan.
With some of its offerings, LambdaTest competes with BrowserStack, a startup valued at $4 billion. Without naming any competitors, Khan said LambdaTest’s offerings are far more comprehensive and its approach to scaling unique. (BrowserStack certainly appears to see LambdaTest as a competitor. A Google search for LambdaTest returned BrowserStack as the top sponsored result last week, for instance.)
The startup plans to further expand its offerings and also its headcount. Currently it employs about 250 people, mostly in India and the U.S. With the new funding, Khan said he is looking to aggressively expand the team in the Bay Area.
“LambdaTest is helping businesses orchestrate their test execution by providing them cost-effective and scalable solutions while giving them improved control over their existing infrastructure without the need to add more to it. They are pushing the boundaries of speed, reliability and performance of test execution. We are happy to partner with this super ambitious LambdaTest team that is looking to change the face of test execution,” said Atul Gupta, a partner at Premji Invest, in a statement.