Mabl announces $20 million Series B to bring automated QA to enterprise customers

Mabl, a Boston-based startup from the folks who brought you Stackdriver, wants to change software testing using machine learning, and today it announced a $20 million Series B investment led by GV (formerly Google Ventures).

Existing investors CRV and Amplify Partners also participated. As part of the deal, Karim Faris, general partner at GV will be joining the Mabl board. Today’s investment comes on top of a $10 million Series A announced in February.

While it was at it, the company also announced a brand new enterprise product. In fact, part of the reason for going for a hefty Series B so soon after landing the Series A was because it takes some money to service enterprise clients, company founder Izzy Azeri explained.

Azeri says that when he and his partner Dan Belcher decided to start a new company after selling Stackdriver to Google in 2014, they wanted to be methodical about it. They did some research to find gaps and pain points the new company could address. What they found was that QA wasn’t keeping up with modern development speed.

They saw development and testing teams spending too much time simply maintaining the testing regimen, and they believed with machine learning they could help automate the QA process and deliver it in the form of a cloud service, allowing testing to keep up.

Instead of looking at the code level, Mabl looks at your website or service and alerts you to errors like increased load time, broken links or other problems, and displays the results in a dashboard. When it finds an issue, it flags the step in the process where the problem occured and sends a screenshot to the test or development team where they can analyze it and fix it if needed.

Mabl dashboard. Screenshot: Mabl

They launched in Beta last February and went GA in May. Since then, they were pleasantly surprised to find that larger companies were interested in their service and they knew they needed to beef up the base product to appeal to these customers.

That meant adding secure tunneling, which they call Mabl Link, a higher level of encryption, support for cross-browser testing and integration with enterprise single sign-on. They also needed a higher level of support and training, which are also part of the enterprise package.

They let each customer try the full suite of features when they sign up for 21 days, after which they can drop down to Pro or sign up for the enterprise version, depending on their budgets and requirements.

Mabl currently has 30 employees in Boston, and as they develop the enterprise business, the plan is bring that up to 70 in the next year as they add enterprise sales people, customer success staff and of course more engineering to keep building the product.

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