BrowserStack’s unicorn status further strengthens India’s SaaS club

• BrowserStack has become the most valued VC-backed SaaS company to enter the Indian unicorn club.
• The company is valued at $4 billion, followed by Girish Mathrubootham-led Freshworks valued at $3.5 billion.
• BrowserStack will be accelerating its acquisition plans in order to expand its global presence and product offerings.

BrowserStack has become the most valued venture capital-backed software-as-a-service (SaaS) company in India. The Mumbai-based startup has raised $200 million (₹1,474 Cr) in a Series B round led by US-based investment firm BOND, at a valuation of $4 billion. Insight Partners and existing investor Accel also participated in the round.

BrowserStack will be joining SaaS firms like Freshworks, Icertis, Druva, Postman, Zenoti and ChargeBee in the ‘unicorn club’. A unicorn is a privately valued company with a valuation of over $1 billion. BrowserStack is going to be a leader in terms of valuation, among the other SaaS unicorns in India.

Notably, companies like Icertis, Zenoti, Postman and few others are registered in the United States, but are considered by many as Indian startups due to their Indian roots. Some of these companies also have the majority of their offices and workforce in India.

Notably, Sridhar Vembu-led Zoho Corp is also one of the biggest SaaS companies in India and is estimated to be valued at over $1 billion, given it has over 45 million customers across the globe and has earned a profit of ₹800 crore in FY20. The valuation has, however, never been accorded to the company as it continues to be bootstrapped since its inception in 1996.

According to a report by Bain & Company, the Indian SaaS companies have the potential to capture a 7-9% share of the global SaaS market by 2022. Such an expansion would also aid Indian SaaS firms to reach a combined revenue of $18 billion to $20 billion in the same timeline.

BrowserStack’s entry into the unicorn club further proves the interest of the investors in the Indian SaaS sector. Commenting on the same, BOND’s general partner, Jay Simons, said, "As software continues to rewire everything, the bar on speed and quality continues to rise, and testing software across the expanding number of browsers and devices is a huge and expensive challenge for development teams to manage on their own."

Founded in 2011 by Ritesh Arora and Nakul Aggarwal, BrowserStack is a software testing platform used by developers to test their websites or mobile applications across browsers, operating systems and devices. The company claims to have over 50,000 customers and over four million developer signups. The company’s clientele also includes over half of Fortune 500 companies like Microsoft, Twitter, Barclays and Expedia, and claims to power over two million tests every day across 15 global data centres.


BrowserStack has raised about $250 million in funding till date, with $50 million coming in from Accel as a part of its Series A round raised in 2018. It plans to use the latest capital infusion to scale its global presence, expand product offering and also enable strategic acquisitions. Prior to this, the company acquired San Francisco-based visual testing platform Percy in July last year.

"We will continue to scale rapidly across functions to accelerate the rate at which we take new products to market. This funding will allow us to explore the different ways in which we can bring new products to market -- via acquisitions, via acqui-hires, or by investing more heavily in our product and engineering teams," Ritesh Arora, cofounder and chief executive of BrowserStack, said in statement.


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