IVP Invests in Red-Hot Testing Company Sauce Labs

Today, IVP announced our participation in a $70M growth financing for Sauce Labs, along with Centerview Capital and Adams Street Partners. Sauce Labs is the provider of the world’s largest cloud based platform for automated testing of web and mobile applications in the enterprise. Sauce has emerged as the driving force behind Selenium and Appium, the open source frameworks for automated desktop, mobile and IoT testing.

For those not familiar with IVP, we’re a later-stage venture capital firm based in Menlo Park, CA. We have a long history of partnering with great technology startups. Since our founding in 1980, we have invested in over 300 companies, including 103 that completed IPOs. A few of our most exciting enterprise companies over the years have included Seagate, Juniper Networks, Concur and more recently, Pure Storage, Domo and Tanium.

So why was IVP so excited to back the team at Sauce Labs as they bring automated testing into the enterprise?

Open Source Thought Leadership of Major Testing Automation Frameworks

Sauce was cofounded by the original creator of Selenium, Jason Huggins, and the company remains a supporter of the framework that allows enterprises to easily automate their functional web testing. In more recent years, the company has contributed significant resources toward Appium, a similar framework to ensure native, hybrid and mobile web apps can take advantage of automated testing as well. Sauce has been well established as the open source thought leader in automated testing and recently announced the upcoming SauceCon user conference in June ’17. SauceCon will focus on educating customers how automated app testing can enable more efficient software development methodologies.

Nobody Wants “Spaghetti” Without Sauce

Mobile and app developers must operate in a world with multiple browsers, multiple operating systems and hundreds of devices with unique hardware specs. This can lead to functional breakdowns when applications haven’t been properly tested in the right combinations. If you were to map out the potential combinations, you would quickly have a complex chart of exponential complexity that resembles a plate of spaghetti. Imagine that you’re a web or mobile app developer and you’ve decided to drop some new functionality into your app. Will it still work in production? Without Sauce Labs, time intensive manual testing is required and new code either doesn’t get pushed or it doesn’t get tested.

Enabling the Rise of the “Buzzword” Software Development (Agile, DevOps, Continuous Integration / Continuous Deployment, Continuous Delivery)

The world’s most advanced technology organizations are increasingly moving their software development from the traditional waterfall model to more flexible and efficient methodologies. Regardless of which buzzwords we use to describe where an organization is on the spectrum of software development (Agile, DevOps, CD/CI/ etc.), proper testing is becoming a tremendous bottleneck in the process. Sauce Labs has emerged as one of the primary tools that organizations can use to automate their software testing and support any development methodology.

An Experienced Management Team

Sauce is led by an exceptional team of industry veterans including Charles Ramsey, the Company’s CEO. Prior to Sauce, Charles was a long-time sales executive at Quest Software, where he helped the company scale from $70M in sales to greater than $850M in annual revenue prior to their acquisition by Dell in 2012. Charles is backed by a deep bench of skilled executives including cofounder/CTO Steve Hazel, who has been working on making Selenium the ideal testing framework for more than 8 years.

An Exceptional and Enthusiastic Customer List

A major part of any investor’s due diligence process is speaking to customers who have evaluated the often highly complex product offerings of technology companies. Rarely have we at IVP seen a more satisfied and enthusiastic customer base than when speaking with users about the advantages of using Sauce Labs. Sauce customers include some the best technology, financial services, media and retail companies in the world. Yahoo, Salesforce, American Express, Walmart and countless other exceptional technology organizations use Sauce Labs to speed up their development and deployment and confidently test their applications in the cloud.

Interested in learning more about Sauce Labs? Click here to find out more.

Sandy Miller is a General Partner at IVP, a later-stage venture capital firm based in Menlo Park, CA. James Newell is a Vice President and Louise Ireland is an Associate at IVP.