Today is a big day for QA. I’m incredibly excited to announce that we have raised a $12mm Series A, led by Byron Deeter of Bessemer Venture Partners.

We wouldn’t be here without our customers. So a huge THANK YOU to our customers paying us to help solve their QA problems. Thank you for believing in us, we feel lucky to work for you every day.

We’re working to remove QA from the long list of things that distract the modern software company. Bessemer has invested in 25% of all SaaS IPOs ever, and was an early investor in Twilio, Box, GainSight, and Intercom, all companies that we admire for their business success as much as their obsessive product focus.

Russ and I started Rainforest in July of 2012, because everyone told us that QA needed fixing. We came up with a novel idea: harness a crowd of human testers to execute simple manual tests for software companies.

However we quickly realized that there was a much bigger challenge beyond, “I need to know what’s broken right now.” And that’s what this $12mm is for. To keep building the future of QA.

Now, almost four years later we’re a team of 33 (as of today at least) that is working hard to build a sustainable business by making your lives easier. And most importantly perhaps, have fun doing it.

To the next four years!

Fred

PRESS RELEASE FOLLOWS

  • Investment Will Help Rainforest QA Tackle Mission to Replace the QA Team
  • Byron Deeter, Partner at BVP, Will Join Board of Directors

SAN FRANCISCO (February 17, 2016) – Rainforest QA, the company replacing the QA team with a QA-as-a-Service platform, today announced it has raised $12 million in Series A funding led by BVP with participation from Rincon Venture Partners, Industry Ventures and Salesforce founder Marc Benioff. Byron Deeter, partner at BVP, will join Rainforest QA’s board of directors.

In response to its 900 percent growth in 2015, Rainforest QA will use the investment to expand its mobile capabilities and offer new services for enterprise, in addition to growing its team from 36 people to 80 by 2017 and opening a headquarters in San Francisco.

“Today, to build world class software you need to build a world class QA team. We’re working to make it so, just like with infrastructure, that no longer needs to be the case,” said Fred Stevens-Smith, co-founder and CEO of Rainforest QA. “With this round of funding, we are continuing to work toward our goal of providing world class QA, on demand, so our customers can focus on what’s important: building the best software.”

Nearly every software company relies on integration testing, which requires developers to monitor the early stages of development, but because most businesses want to ship code multiple times a day, QA quickly becomes a hurdle; especially manual QA, which requires real people to apply their intelligence to functional tests.

The Rainforest QA Platform eliminates the manual QA barrier, performing on-demand regression testing at the speed of automation by leveraging a crowd of 50 thousand testers. The platform takes a bionic approach, combining the human crowd with machine learning to drastically reduce the time it takes to do manual testing, with results often returned in less than 30 minutes, as compared to the hours, days or weeks it takes to do otherwise. The outcome is a faster turnaround, lower costs, more thorough coverage and a streamlined management process that enables continuous deployment.

“Our deployment schedule is unpredictable, to say the least. We deploy at all hours of the day and night and need a QA platform that can keep up,” said Laks Srini, co-founder and CTO of Zenefits. “Rainforest has been the key to our successful tests, empowering us to update and ship code 24×7 and allowing us to focus on building quality software, not managing testers.”

Rainforest launched in 2013 as a QA service running functional tests against a crowd from Amazon’s Mechanical Turk. Since then, the company has scaled its QA-as-a-Service API to serve clients such as Zenefits, IBM, Lutron, Procore, Betterworks and Consumer Affairs, among others.

“Even for the best, most successful software companies in our portfolio, QA is a huge pain point,” said Byron Deeter, partner at BVP. “We are in the unique position to have insight into these challenges and are thrilled to support Rainforest in reinventing the way we see and experience QA.”

The Series A round of funding follows a $4 million seed round in 2015 from Storm Ventures, Rincon Venture Partners, Andreessen Horowitz, Morado and Crosslink. The latest round brings the company’s total funding to $16 million.

About Rainforest QA

The Rainforest Continuous QA Platform provides on-demand manual QA-as-a-Service so that agile and continuous deployment teams can develop software quickly without compromising quality. Powered by 50 thousand qualified testers, the platform serves as a management tool for writing, running and getting manual QA results is less than 30 minutes so that companies can focus on building quality software, not managing individual testers. Full feature access is available via API to seamlessly incorporate the platform into your existing development workflow.