Waldo raises $15M to grow true script-less testing platform

Today, I am proud to announce that Waldo closed a $15M Series A round led by Joshua Zelman at Insight Partners with the participation of Matrix Partners and First Round Capital. Also joining us in this round Nicolas Dessaigne (Founder of Algolia), Ben Porterfield (Co-founder of Looker), Tyler Gaffney (CEO of Zenhub) and Keenan Rice (GM at Firebolt).

But fundraising is not an end in itself. It's a means to help us grow our vision and an opportunity to think back at why Waldo exists in the first place. After ten years working as an iOS engineer, designer, and product manager, my patience grew thin with how mobile app testing was done since the first iPhone came out in 2007.

In the last three decades, DevOps has taken over the world. It provides great tools and solution to increase our organization’s ability to deliver applications and services at high velocity. This allowed us to shorten Dev Cycles , bring features to the market faster. This is all targets one objective for mobile teams: Continuous Delivery to acquire users, retain them, and get feedback faster.

But in mobile, testing is still a bottleneck that slows this process down. Until now, there only was 2 options to choose from: Manual testing and automation via scripting.

Manual testing is slow, tedious and prone to human error. It's simply a no-go when you are serious about shipping frequently and quality. Then came the dream of automating mobile testing using scripts: it should have allowed teams to test more, faster. In reality these coded tests are time consuming to code, extremely flaky and effectively impossible to scale. After 6 months, most teams only have six tests automated tests that they end up muting because the results can’t be trusted: “is my test failing because I have a bug in my app or because my script is not working properly?”. Scripting tests is a total waste of time for engineers who should be focusing on shipping improvements and features rather than writing and maintaining test scripts.

That led me and Laurent, my co-founder and CTO, to start Waldo in 2018 with one idea, create the first true no-code testing solution dedicated to mobile that delivers true continuous end-to-end testing.

Our goal is simple: help mobile teams test more, test faster, and get reliable results. We built a mobile testing technology from the ground up that simplifies testing, letting teams focus on building amazing mobile apps. No more compromising between speed and quality. This fundraising round allows us to continue working towards this vision:

• Dramatically increase your test coverage, quickly, with no flakiness. Waldo comes with a built-in infrastructure, so you can start building tests quickly. The recorder is intuitive, allowing you to create a test by interacting with your app the same way you would if you held a device in your hand. For each step in your test, Waldo organically understands how your screen is supposed to look and the expected behavior. No more coding strings, accessibilityIDs, or wait times. It does it all on its own.
• Vastly improved testing velocity. Different teams, different objectives. Whether you want to run a large regression test suite on multiple devices once a week, or multiple times a day, you can choose how fast you want your results to match your workflow.
• Clear and reliable test results. At a glance, even non-technical team members can understand results visually and have clear actionable items. It provides a clear foundation for your team to start working on fixing issues in your app. Cross-functional communication and reproduction issues are a thing of the past.

Our Series A funding will help us execute our vision and grow faster:

• Scaling our GTM team to continue attracting more top-rated mobile apps and help them ship high-quality mobile products to the market, fast. I am glad to announce that Nico Snyder, former VP of sales at Code Climate, joined Waldo as our VP Sales to help us achieve this mission.
• Continue innovating and solving the problem at hand to supports our customers at scale, while providing more actionable signals to help improve products and keep mobile app users satisfied.
• Finally, we'll be focusing on hiring more amazing talents who share our vision that product can elegantly solve complex problems, providing them with an environment where they can grow towards their potential. (Interested executing on this philosophy? We're hiring)

I want to celebrate our team and the progress we made in 2021:

• Happy customers is our priority number 1 and our NPS~80% is a good progress toward that goal
• We've increased our revenue 6X in 2021 while growing our team from 8 to 20 people.
• We've built a community of top mobile apps in high-growth industries like finance, education, crypto, insurance, and healthcare. It spans from the Americas, across the Atlantic to Europe.
• Most importantly we shipped amazing value for our customers and caught thousands of critical bugs. I am excited for what is to come in our roadmap in 2022!

Building a company is hard and I am grateful for those helping make this possible. I want to express my appreciation to:

• Stan Reiss at Matrix Partners for believing in Waldo from the very beginning.
• Josh Kopelman at First Round Capital for helping us kick off our growth. You and your team have provided us with unbelievable resources to help us turn an idea into a business.
• Joshua Zelman for recognizing our potential in this market and allowing us to speed up our journey towards the next level.
• Our customers for pushing us and providing valuable feedback to keep improving the Waldo experience.
• And finally our friends, family, and team for providing fantastic emotional support. You are the best.

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