Testing Times Made Easy

With its platform that allows software testing in quick time, BrowserStack has won over global clients and is making a profit too

- Harichandan Arakali

IT WAS DURING AN argument over software testing for their third startup, consulting gig Downcase, in 2011 that Ritesh Arora and Nakul Aggarwal, both IIT Bombay graduates, had an epiphany. Aggarwal had taken on testing the previous two times and didn’t want to do the thankless job again.

The argument spawned a business idea that not only turned profitable in six months after going commercial, but also made browser and app testing painless for 2 million designers, developers and testers, say Aggarwal (32), and Arora (33).

At their modest office in Mumbai’s Andheri, Arora, CEO, and Aggarwal, CTO, recalled how they worked for four months to build a beta version of Browser Stack, a cross browser and app testing platform. When they notched up 10,000 beta users in the following few months, they launched the commercial version.

Today, in six years, Browser Stack has four products being used by customers in 135 countries, including Microsoft, Facebook, Twitter and Airbnb.

“No one likes to test. You just want to write code, you want to build cool stuff, you don’t want to test it,” Shailesh Rao, the company’s new chief operating officer, who took on the role in January, tells Forbes India. “But you can’t avoid testing.” Rao, until recently, was a senior director with Google’s cloud business, and later at product operations.

He is expanding Browser Stack’s San Francisco office, from where he will oversee the company’s global market push.