- Kobiton announced it raised $5.2 million in a new round of funding for fueling the growth of its mobile app experience business
Kobiton announced it raised $5.2 million in a new round of funding to fuel the growth of its mobile app experience business. This round of funding was led by BIP Capital and Dan Drechsel is joining the board of directors at the company.
Existing investors KMS Technology, Kinetic Ventures, and Jon Hallett (Executive Chairman of BetterCloud), Ken Walters (formerly president and COO of Infor) and Kevin Lee (CEO of Kobiton) also joined the round. Including this round, Kobiton has raised more than $8 million total.
Kobiton had launched in 2016 after spinning out of KMS Technology’s incubator called Upstar Labs. Some of the other companies that spun out of Upstar include software testing company QASymphony (acquired by Tricentis) and Katalon (leading test automation platform.)
Kobiton’s mobile app testing platform is known for improving the quality of mobile apps resulting in better user experiences and improved app store ratings by offering manual and automated testing on real devices in the cloud or on-premise. There are more than 500 companies and 35,000 testers/developers have used Kobiton’s platform to-date. And the company’s customers include Cap Gemini, Frontier Airlines, GreenSky, Office Depot, and Q2.
With this round of funding, Kobiton plans to expand its sales, marketing, customer support, and product development. Kobiton is also in the process of adding new “Record & Playback” capabilities to its platform.
“We view the caliber of investors as a vote of confidence in our business, our team, and our product,” said Kobiton CEO Kevin Lee. “Having established ourselves as the leading real-device mobile testing platform, we’re expanding our offering with Record & Playback, the first mobile scriptless automation capability, to help organizations make the jump to automation. This investment validates our momentum and accelerates go-to-market for our new AI scriptless Appium automation technology.”
Generally, building automated test scripts for mobile requires extensive coding knowledge and it is typically done in a framework called Appium. Kobiton is introducing the ability for a user to record a script by interacting with an app as a user would and then intelligently plays back that script on hundreds of devices to identify issues and anomalies that may negatively impact the user experience (UX). This function will help companies rapidly adopt mobile test automation at scale.
“Organizations are finding it challenging to adopt mobile test automation at scale,” added Drechsel. “The unique requirements of utilizing real-devices, coupled with the complexity of developing test automation scripts, has allowed, up to now, only the most sophisticated organizations to tackle this challenge. Kobiton is truly transforming mobile test automation by leveraging its vast experience in real-device testing and adding AI-powered scriptless test automation technology to its platform.”
