INSUBCONTINENT EXCLUSIVE:
This morning ProdPerfect, a technology startup focused on web application testing, announced a $13 million Series A led by Anthos
Capital. Anthos is perhaps best known for investing in Honey, a startup which recently sold to PayPal for several billion
dollars.ProdPerfect, a remote-focused company, closed a $2.6 million seed round earlier in 2019
Fika Ventures and Eniac Ventures took part in the Series A after also putting capital into the company in the company’s preceding seed
The startup has now raised $15.7 million across three rounds, according to Crunchbase.What does ProdPerfect’s product do regarding
testing? And what is it going to do with all its new money? TechCrunch chatted with Dan Widing, ProdPerfect’s founder and CEO, to answer
those questions, and learn how quickly the company is growing.TestingProdPerfect automates end-to-end testing for web developers
According to Widing, the product “followed some of the lessons of the product analytics industry to build a tool that lets us
quantitatively understand how our customers’ live users traverse the customers’ web application.” The company estimates that “many
companies are compelled to put around 20% of their engineering budget into staffing a QA engineering department,” spend that it reckons it
can help cut.The web is a big place, with lots of pages and apps and more built and maintained by a global army of developers
Those end products require testing to find errors and bugs that could cause havoc for end users and companies alike
You can test well, or poorly
But according to Widing, the “gold standard of web testing is either directly or indirectly controlling a browser to traverse the site
like a user does,” also known as “end-to-end testing.”The product seems to have found early market traction
According to Widing, 18 months after landing its first handful of customers, his company has reached the 50-customer mark, generating
“around $2 million” in annual recurring revenue (ARR), a standard revenue metric for modern software (SaaS) companies.What’s nextWhen
TechCrunch last covered ProdPerfect, we called it a “Boston-based startup focused on automating QA testing for web apps.” All of that is
still true aside from the location
According to its CEO, ProdPerfect transferred its headquarters from Boston to San Francisco earlier in 2019
However, Widing said, ProdPerfect doesn’t focus on the move much, as it views itself as “a remote-first company.”But no matter where
its nexus sits, the company plans on investing heavily in sales and marketing spend (traditional for a Series A-level company looking to
quickly expand revenue), and invest in “product development and customer service,” according to Widing
So, tech investments, go-to-market spend and a modest war chest for the future are the game plan for ProdPerfect’s new money
(Widing noted in an email to TechCrunch that “it helps to have a good stockpile” in times of global macro uncertainty, which is a smart
perspective.)The firm ARR figure that ProdPerfect provided will help the market vet its progress over the next few years
The company will probably aim for more than a doubling in size next year, more likely shooting for a tripling
So, how close to $6 million ARR that ProdPerfect can reach in 2020 will be fun to watch
If the firm manages that sort of growth, expect it to raise again to keep investing in its product and go-to-market motion.Photo by Ilya
