“New kid” testing firms in VC funding

It’s been a busy few weeks for emerging players in the software testing marketplace. This review captures some of the most interesting recent venture capital funding rounds – including completed deals for accessibility testing specialist Evinced, mobile app tester Mobot and low-code platform Retool.

Accessibility testing has become increasingly important because of the requirement under the US Americans with Disabilities Act that websites are treated as public spaces, and therefore must not discriminate against customers with disabilities.

Meanwhile, the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), an industry organisation, is close to announcing version 2.2 of its international Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG). WCAG 2.2 is expected to become a “Candidate Recommendation” by September 2022, according to the W3C, meaning it has met consensus and satisfies technical requirements for full adoption for adoption later this year. The largest change from 2.1 includes adding accessible authentication steps around multi factor authentication and the explicit allowance for mechanisms like password managers.

Accessibility specialist Evinced raised $38m in a series B funding in June, led by Insight Venture Partners. Evinced was founded in 2018 by Navin R. Thadani and Gal Moav, two former Oracle executives based in Palo Alto and Israel respectively. Evinced launched its web and mobile accessibility testing solutions in 2021. The platforms scan user flows to identify problems for screen readers and keyboard-reliant users (those who cannot use mice alongside their keyboard) through the use of a system of advanced code analysis, which Evinced claims can catch problems overlooked by static syntax checks.

Another accessibility testing firm, Stark has recently secured a $6m seed led by Uncork Capita and yet another, Assistiv Labs, raised a $1m pre-seed led by Zenda Capital.

Mobile app testing firms have seen demand boosted by the Covd pandemic. New York-based Mobot claims to be unique in its testing process, using robots to physically test applications on real mobile devices. Mobot says its platform can enable the automation of tests that cannot be completed by emulators. In August, Mobot completed its series A funding round of $12.5m, led by Cota Capital.

Sofy, a no-code mobile test automation platform, received $7.75 in seed funding, led by Voyager Capital. Founded in 2016 and headquartered in Washington state, Sofy enables manual and no-code automated testing of mobile apps and websites.

Two firms specialising in low-code development tools have also raised funding.One is Retool, which uses a base of 90 development components to allow for the quick construction of internal applications. CEO and co-founder David Hsu described this process as being able to cut coding down to: “the last 20% or 30%” of the work on any project.

“Retool sits at the intersection of two major trends: the rise of the developer and the increasing importance of operational excellence after a pandemic that compressed a decade of digital transformation into two years,” said Bryan Schreier, a partner at Sequoia Capital, the firm leading the $45m series C investment.

Founded in 2021, Superblocks provides the building blocks for quickly spinning up internal tools and APIs, utilising a library of popular components to reduce the need for skills in languages such as React, HTML or CSS. Superblocks completed $37m in funding from Kleiner Perkins, Greenoaks, Spark and Meritech in mid-August.

Other recent investments include Cloud optimiser, Sync Computing, landing $12m in funding led by Costanoa Ventures, and Massdriver, a cloud architecture platform for DevOps receiving a $4m seed from Y Combinator.