Mumbai-based SaaS firm BrowserStack has taken over Percy, a San Francisco Bay Area based company in an all cash and stock deal. Five-year-old Percy specializes in automatic visual testing which will improve the capacity of BrowserStock’s product suite. The nature of the deal is deemed to be a “product, technology and customer acquisition”.
Ritesh Arora, co-founder and chief executive officer of BrowserStack told ET, “We are the largest player in the testing space globally and are constantly expanding our product lines. There is a growing need from software teams for visual testing, and the market has now reached maturity. The adoption has been phenomenal, and we believe the timing is right. An acquisition helps us in saving time and go to market faster.”
The firm stated that the deal will help them to move towards their vision of becoming the testing infrastructure of the internet. Arora added that BrowserStack is expanding its product lines and therefore is looking forward to more acquisitions in next 12-18 months.
Visual testing, in layman terms, is the automated process of detecting and reviewing visual changes in a website. It helps compare what a website looks like to what it is supposed to look like, and helps spot visual bugs that may have crept in with a new release. Percy is the said to be a leader in the space with a client base of over 1000 including big names like Google and Shopify.
“Automation allows us to use algorithms to quickly match older and newer versions of the app/website, which helps in increasing the speed and efficiency of the website,” Arora added. BrowserStack was founded by Arora and Nakul Aggarwal in 2011 and presently has over 25000 clients including Microsoft and Twitter making it a global leader in the space.