The way we build software has changed; the way we do QA hasn’t. At Rainforest we’re changing that by helping companies rethink QA and bring it into the era of continuous delivery. Our focus is solely QA, and we have spent the last six years helping hundreds of companies hit their business goals through smarter QA strategy and execution.
As I told the team when we announced our Series B internally a few months ago – yay, we raised more money! This runway gives us more time to solve the problems we need to solve and to turn our startup into a real business. Raising money is not a real achievement though, and we – as a company and as an industry – need to be vigilant against celebrating vanity metrics at the expense of celebrating the real hard work that goes on behind the scenes and enables us to get funded in the first place.
Over the past six years each of the key questions that my co-founder Russ and I started Rainforest with have been answered. A quick recap:
- Could a crowd deliver high quality regression results?
- Could the crowd return results fast enough for continuous delivery?
- Was this a big enough problem to build a big business on?
- Could we automate the basic parts of the human testing role over time?
It’s obvious to us at Rainforest that the future software company will thrive or die based on its ability to focus on the customer. Software companies today must unfortunately become world class at many facets of business – unsurprisingly, most fail. QA is one of these many facets, and Rainforest will continue to work hard until we’re able to deliver a truly world-class QA organization to all our customers, as a service.
We’re now at the point where we’ve answered each of these questions. With this understanding and this new injection of capital, we’re able to expand our scope to tackle more of the ‘QA Problem’. We’re working towards a day when our customers will be able to rely 100% on Rainforest to drive a multifaceted, nuanced and business-appropriate investment in quality.
We’ve had an incredible group of customers who have helped us answer these questions. To all customers past and present, thank you! Without you we wouldn’t be here today. Your belief in our vision for the future, your feedback and criticism, and your support in the community is a big part of why 100 Rainforesters come to work every day.
To our shareholders, old and new – thank you for your support! Don’t listen to people that say raising money is easy – raising money is always hard, and our fantastic capital partners have made it as easy as it possibly could have been. Which is to say, still almost impossible.
Finally, to the Good Ship Rainforest – this funding milestone is for all of you! If, six years ago, you’d have told me that we would raise more than $40mm, would get to work with 100 no BS, weirdly passionate individuals, and support hundreds of software companies that we admire… I’d have told you you’re crazy. Although let’s be real – we start companies because we’re irrationally optimistic, so I probably would have said “that’s it?!”In that spirit, here’s to another six years of Rainforest changing the QA industry and setting the bar for balancing hyper-growth with hyper-culture. Onwards!