Forbes India Outstanding Startup BrowserStack is building a global software leader from India

It was during an argument over software testing at their third startup, a consulting venture called Downcase, that Arora, 39, and Aggarwal, 38, both IIT-Bombay graduates, had an epiphany. Testing was a thankless job, but one that was necessary. Thus was born BrowserStack, which turned profitable in six months after going commercial, validating the truth behind the epiphany.

Almost all of its product development and engineering is conducted from India, mostly Mumbai—its headquarters in the country and where the founders live. For the company’s Indian entity, BrowserStack Software Private Limited, the venture reported net profit of Rs129 crore (about $15.4 million) for the year ended March 31, 2024, on revenue of Rs682 crore (about $81 million), according to its filings in India, sourced from Tracxn, a private markets intelligence provider.

Among the marquee customers that BrowserStack’s 1,200 or so employees serve are Meta, Amazon, Google, Microsoft, Tesco, Airbnb, Ikea, Spotify, Expedia and Walt Disney. The company has tens of thousands of paying customers and millions of developer signups.

Listen: Nakul Aggarwal on BrowserStack's latest acquisition on journey to testing platform

BrowserStack, which also has offices in San Francisco and New York, has raised more than $250 million in funding from investors, including Bond Capital, which led the company’s Series B $200 million investment round in 2021, Insight Partners, and Accel. When that deal was announced, BrowserStack was privately valued at $4 billion by its investors.

Shekhar Kirani, one of the partners at Accel who convinced the entrepreneurs to take VC money for the first time in 2018—having engaged with them for some six years—says the duo has built a company with “phenomenal cashflow”, and one that is the “de facto leader” in testing software on browsers and mobile devices.

“The amount of tech they’ve solved and developed, you could call them a deeptech company, one of its kind,” he says. And they have set up data centres around the world supporting their customers and developers to test their mobile applications on real devices across multiple markets, he adds.

Kirani, who sits on the board of directors at BrowserStack, recalls that every conversation with both the co-founders was in the context of a “phenomenal engineering mindset”, over the years he kept engaging with them as they bootstrapped to about $30 million in revenues, before they agreed to take $50 million in one go from Accel alone, for their Series A round.

Those conversations were about “one, seeking truth about what exactly is the problem, asking questions, collecting information, doing their own homework and making their own decisions”, he recalls. By the time that funding happened, the conversations had evolved into “strategic ones, about growing the company, having a multi-product strategy, building a global team, almost like board-level questions.”

Another thing that makes BrowserStack stand out is that having been profitable almost from the get-go helped Arora and Aggarwal negotiate from a position of strength. They did not exactly need VC money, but they could do with the deep experience and the global connects that firms such as Accel offered, which proved useful in ramping up growth in the years that followed.

Also read: How unicorn Browserstack became a profitable $100 million Indian Saas company

The two founders hold a solid majority ownership, which means they do not face the kind of pressure that other founders often do, having diluted their equity to very low double digits or even less over a series of funding rounds—pressure for exits from VCs and so on.

That said, “we want to build a high-growth business. Growth is accelerating, and we want to keep doing that for the next three years. Get to about 30 to 40 percent growth rate”, Arora says.

The second objective is to move from point solutions and testing to an entire test platform. Third is to tap into artificial intelligence (AI), he says, “We want to transform the entire testing market with AI.”

With both in-house development and careful acquisitions, Arora and Aggarwal have added capabilities such as accessibility testing and sophisticated reporting and debugging. With several more products and “tool chains” in the pipeline, for both web and app development, the plan is that they will all have a common layer with pulling together everything from data architecture to onboarding methods and customer experience.

“Our focus has shifted from test infrastructure to a broader testing platform,” Aggarwal had told Forbes India shortly after the company had made its latest acquisition, a company called Bird Eats Bug, a software bug detection and reporting tech provider based in Berlin.

Three years ago, mobile testing was a significant part of BrowserStack’s business, with much emphasis on iPhone and Android testing, alongside Chrome and Safari browsers. Since then, “we’ve expanded our offerings considerably”, says Aggarwal, who is CTO.

They launched four products in ‘accessibility testing,’ acquired a company called Percy for ‘visual testing’, and built a no-code testing platform. They also developed an ‘observability tool’ for testing.

“Our goal is to broaden our scope beyond traditional testing infrastructure,” Aggarwal says. “We’re transforming from a test infrastructure provider to a cohesive, ubiquitous testing platform company, where the testing landscape is quite fragmented.”

With AI in the mix, there are opportunities to offer more to customers because currently, the process of going from a quality check to ‘production’, meaning commercial version, is disjointed, Aggarwal points out.

Also read: Meet the duo that's making software testing a child's play

The business ambition is twofold, Arora adds. One, a comprehensive platform holds the potential for expanding BrowserStack’s TAM (total addressable market) by 10x, he says. “And AI can add another 2x or 3x.” The more BrowserStack succeeds in getting customers to embrace its platform, consolidating more of their testing on one platform, the more data there is on one platform.

“They can then do deep AI,” Arora says. He expects BrowserStack to make various stages of the testing process as much as 50 percent more efficient with AI-led automation. At that level, the cost savings will be “human spend, and not just be software spend”, he says. That means, customers will need fewer people to run their tests on the BrowserStack platform. When that starts happening, “we’ll end up delivering disproportionate value to our users”, he says.

Around that time, it wouldn’t be surprising to see BrowserStack seek a listing in India. About reports that BrowserStack had started the process of moving its headquarters to India, Arora said nothing had been set in motion and a decision is “far away”. “Everyone is evaluating it and we’re also evaluating” the option, he said.

The reasons are as follows: “India as a market has matured a lot in the last five years. When we started BrowserStack, it was difficult to explain to someone (here) what SaaS is,” Arora says. Today, “there is huge landscape change”.

Another factor is demand and supply, he says. “In the US market, there are too many tech companies, whereas in India, it is the opposite. Barely any good tech company is listed. That just creates a large opportunity in the Indian markets.”