QA Wolf secures $36M to grow its app QA-testing suite
Quality assurance in the app development world is a necessary, but often resource-draining, undertaking. According to Statista, 23% of companies' annual IT budgets are allocated to in-house or third-party contracted QA and testing. The stakes are high. In a survey by QA software-testing company QualiTest Group, 88% of app users said that they'd abandon apps with bugs and glitches.
Jon Perl, Laura Cressman and Scott Wilson — software developers and marketers by trade — had the idea to create a platform, QA Wolf, to make QA for mobile and web apps easier by automating aspects of creating and running tests.
There's no shortage of solutions to automate QA testing. As Julie Bort wrote in her coverage of code-testing startup Nova AI, it seems that TechCrunch reports on a new one practically every week. So what makes QA Wolf different?
Well, for one, QA Wolf pivoted. When the company launched in 2019, it offered QA test orchestration tools only. The tools worked well enough — at least the way Perl tells it. But customers said that they weren't getting the levels of test coverage that they needed, he said.
"We found that feature work was always prioritized over test automation," Perl said. "So we made a decision to transform our business and launch a new category that we call 'outcomes-based test coverage.'"
This "outcomes-based" approach encourages engineers to prioritize value-adding features as opposed to internal test suites — a common pitfall with QA platforms — Perl said. Some QA platforms, even semi-automated ones, still need large teams, infrastructure and even armies of consultants to maintain. But that's less likely to be the case with QA Wolf.
"Our customers ship 2 to 5x more often after partnering with QA Wolf, and because teams 'shift left' — test earlier in the development cycle — we also cut down the amount of rework," Perl said. "By investing in QA Wolf, executives can give their developers near real-time feedback on their code as they work and allocate more resources to other parts of their business."
Today, QA Wolf customers pay for test coverage rather than individual test runs or compute time. QA Wolf supports largely automated (but with humans in the loop) QA testing for Android and iOS apps as well as web apps and Salesforce apps, and offers additional built-in capabilities for maintenance and bug reporting.
"We charge a flat rate which includes test creation, unlimited parallel test runs and 24-hour failure investigation and maintenance," Perl explained. "The pricing model aligns our incentive to deliver coverage as efficiently as possible, with the customer’s goals."
Companies — and investors — seem to like this.
QA Wolf has over 130 customers, including Salesloft, Drata and AutoTrader.ca. And QA Wolf this week closed a $36 million Series B funding round led by Scale Venture Partners with participation from Threshold Ventures, VentureForGood, Inspired Capital and Notation Capital.
To date, QA Wolf has raised $57 million. Perl says that the latest tranche will be used to build additional features into the platform, enhance QA Wolf's existing automation technology and grow its 130-employee workforce.
"The reason that the various no-code or low-code tools on the market haven’t solved the QA test coverage gap is that when push comes to shove, the user is incentivized to ship new features, not new tests, or the user doesn’t have the technical expertise to build comprehensive test coverage beyond the simplest workflows," Perl said. "QA Wolf’s advantage is that the value we provide is exponentially greater than the alternatives when infrastructure and labor to run and maintain comprehensive end-to-end test coverage is all factored in."
