Mobile app testing company Testlio has raised $6.25 million in Series A funding from two of Silicon Valley’s largest venture capital funds. The Estonian company, which is also present in San Francisco, added the sum to over $1 million in seed money raised since its 2012 inception. The money, which comes from Altos Ventures and Vertex Ventures, will help Testlio push its solutions to other platforms, its founder and CEO told Red Herring.
“Our customers consider us a true partner, and they trust us to handle anything related to their quality assurance and testing needs,” said Kristel Viidik. “We support some of our largest digital entertainment customers today beyond mobile, with desktop, web and console app testing.
“For example, many companies, not just in gaming, are moving their apps to consoles and connected TVs,” she added. “We’ve seen them moving in this direction quite heavily during the last two years, and it’s expanding. We’ve been busy testing apps for Roku, Chromecast, Apple TV and XBox platforms. We are also starting to dabble in virtual reality software testing with Oculus and Samsung Gear.”
Testlio provides expert skills that assist development teams with QA functions. It leverages a vetted global testing community that can test software builds, delivering detailed bug reports rapidly within customers’ existing test environments. Viidik, whose online profile claims her to be a “fanatical tester whose eyes light up when you mention testing,” says this latest injection will help build that community, and “help our existing testers to continue to grow and improve their skills. We’re also hiring in all departments to expand our capabilities in order to build the strongest testing platform in mobile and beyond.”
As the app market has boomed, so the need to test quality quickly and assuredly has followed suit. “Time-to-market demands are a constant pressure; adoption of iterative testing as a part of Agile development practice is necessary to meet this need,” went a recent Forrester Research report. “Dynamic mobile environments, along with a wide variety of devices, define the mobile quality challenge.”
Viidik, whose previous experience was at FlexTrade Systems, Proekspert AS and Fosgate Group, outlined some of the industry’s trends heading into the second quarter of 2016 – including the need to test at all stages of product development.
“We used to see QA only happening at the end of a release cycle, right before it goes out to users,” she said. “However, at that point it’s already too late. Testing at the end of a release only allows you fix one issue, but then other things break in the process and negatively impact the user experience. The need for testing is becoming integral to agile development support.”
Viidik also claims that consoles and virtual reality are a “huge trend in mobile app development and QA testing. This will only increase as major players like Facebook join in the fun with their Oculus Rift device going public this year and more mobile device companies introducing mobile-based streaming and VR solutions.”