<\/p>\n
QA Wolf, a cloud-based platform designed to detect bugs in software, today exited stealth and announced a $20 million funding round led by Inspired Capital with participation from Notation Capital, Operator Partners and Thiel Capital and several angel investors (among them Peter Thiel). CEO Jon Perl tells that the new cash will go toward expanding QA Wolf\u2019s engineering team as well as ongoing sales and marketing efforts.<\/p>\n
\u201cAs software developers ourselves \u2014 working in health tech and fintech, where even minor bugs could have an outsized impact on people\u2019s lives \u2014 we know firsthand how critical robust end-to-end testing is for all software businesses,\u201d Perl said. \u201cOur vision is to become the \u2018operating system for quality\u2019 that companies use to improve the holistic quality of their applications, beginning with automated end-to-end testing.\u201d<\/p>\n
Perl argues that one of the most complex challenges in building software today is the cost \u2014 the people, time, infrastructure cost \u2014 to test code from an end user\u2019s perspective. Indeed, Statista found that organizations spent around 23% of their annual IT budgets on quality assurance and testing between 2012 and 2019. Perl says most companies either hire testers who are paid a pittance to review software manually or use software-as-a-service solutions that have a high technical barrier to entry. Neither, obviously, are very desirable scenarios.<\/p>\n
But wait, you might say \u2014 automated software testing platforms already exist in abundance. There\u2019s Waldo for smartphone apps, Autify for both mobile and the web, and LambdaTest, to name a few. Some newer vendors\u2019 approaches are quite novel, like Mobot\u2019s, which relies on fleets of robots built to bug-test apps.<\/p>\n
But Perl makes the case that QA Wolf removes the complexity of quality assurance testing like few others do. That\u2019s because customers get support along the way, including help developing a test plan, writing and maintaining tests, investigating failures, and reporting bugs.<\/p>\n
\u201cNo matter how big or how small a company is, development teams usually lack the expertise and time to write, run and maintain end-to-end tests in-house,\u201d Perl said. \u201cKnowing that, the market responded by creating lightweight tools that simplify the job or even enable non-technical people to develop test cases. While those tools definitely help, they\u2019re attempting to solve the wrong problem. The fundamental problem is that the industry still treats test coverage as something to build, rather than something to buy.\u201d<\/p>\n
Perl founded QA Wolf in 2019 with the goal of changing that, bringing on co-founders Laura Cressman and Scott Wilson. Perl was previously the head of technology at home service booking platform Dispatch and the CTO of pharmacy supply chain firm Zipdrug. Cressman was a senior software engineer at Cityblock Health, a healthcare company spun out of Alphabet\u2019s Sidewalk Labs, while Wilson was an account manager at Amazon before joining Wyze Labs \u2014 his most recent employer prior to QA Wolf \u2014 as a director of growth marketing.<\/p>\n
At a high level, QA Wolf integrates with companies\u2019 existing internal systems to give a real-time view of their software\u2019s performance. Clients submit a short demo of their app, which QA Wolf uses to build a testing plan and begin coding automated test suites. The platform supports most any software app accessible via the web, including those that leverage third-party services like Stripe and Salesforce.<\/p>\n
As QA Wolf builds out test coverage, it works with clients to help build tests into their processes and address problems with tests as they crop up. Perl notes that tests are written in Playwright, an open source testing package, allowing them to be migrated to other platforms if customers so wish.<\/p>\n
\u201cQA Wolf solves both problems with our technology and people approach, and a business model that incentivizes high performing and accurate testing,\u201d Perl said. \u201cFor executives and technical leaders, QA Wolf ensures that their customers are getting the best possible user experience \u2014 free of bugs \u2014 for a fraction of the cost of how QA was historically done.\u201d<\/p>\n
QA Wolf promises a lot. But in a sign that it\u2019s delivering on at least some<\/em> of those assurances, the 45-person startup already has more than 50 customers, including early-stage ventures like Vividly, Minno and Worksome. Perl declined to reveal revenue figures, but he said that he expects QA Wolf\u2019s workforce to grow to 60 employees by the end of the year as new clients come online.<\/p>\n Perl claims that QA Wolf will continue to differentiate in the future by building datasets of tests across web apps, which will allow it to develop new products and services on top of what the company already offers.<\/p>\n \u201cThrough economies of scale, QA Wolf\u2019s capabilities will only become more powerful, enabling us to deliver high test coverage at an even lower cost than in-house or outsourced alternatives,\u201d he said, stressing that QA Wolf is in stable shape compared to the larger microenvironment for young startups. \u201cThe pandemic has been a positive for us by shortening sales cycles with the shift to Zoom \u2026 In terms of the broader slowdown in tech, so far we have not seen a slowdown in growth and had our biggest week ever for new sales last week. Our revenue has gone up 25x over the past year and business has doubled in the last 6 months alone.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" QA Wolf, a cloud-based platform designed to detect bugs in software, today exited stealth and announced a $20 million funding round led by Inspired Capital with participation from Notation Capital, Operator Partners and Thiel Capital and several angel investors (among them Peter Thiel). CEO Jon Perl tells that the new cash will go toward expanding […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":1200179,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[21],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1200178","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-celebrity-gossip"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ghanamma.com\/2022\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1200178","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ghanamma.com\/2022\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ghanamma.com\/2022\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ghanamma.com\/2022\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ghanamma.com\/2022\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1200178"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.ghanamma.com\/2022\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1200178\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ghanamma.com\/2022\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1200178"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ghanamma.com\/2022\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1200178"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ghanamma.com\/2022\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1200178"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}