Automated software testing startup Cypress has announced the close of a $9.3 million Series A funding round led by Bessemer Venture Partners. This comes only about a year after the open source platform raised its seed round and instituted paid plans for its tool.
Cypress CEO Drew Lanham shares in a blog that Bessemer’s deep history and understanding of developer-centric businesses has made them an ideal partner. The Silicon Valley VC firm also has companies like Twilio, PagerDuty, and SendGrid in their portfolio.
In addition to Bessemer representatives, Cypress has added Github’s SVP of Engineering Jason Warner to their Board of Directors, along with former CEO of Heroku Adam Gross as an investor and advisor.
The Atlanta-based Cypress was founded in 2014 by technologist Brian Mann. He wanted to end the all-too-common practice of manual, laborious software testing, which has to be done over and over again by large companies that release constant software updates.
“A lot of times, it takes longer to write a test and run it than it did to write the code,” Lanham told Hypepotamus in an interview last year.
Cypress allows developers to write tests at the same time they write the actual code, making the entire de-bugging process move much faster.
The platform is also unique to the testing space in that it is open source, meaning the developers who use it can build their own features for specific needs on top of the base platform.
After business strategist Lanham took over as CEO, Cypress began to scale rapidly. They raised a $4 million seed round about a year ago, co-led by Bessemer along with Las Olas Venture Capital.
Following the seed round, Cypress launched its first paid plans (the tool had formerly been free). Over the last year, the company has reached 15 million downloads, with more than 140 million tests recorded.
They have users from 90 countries including developers at Slack, Netflix, SendGrid, GitHub, FanDuel, Lego, SaltStack and GoDaddy.
Cypress remains headquartered in Atlanta, though they have a distributed team of developers across the country. A portion of this funding will go towards hiring, particularly engineers.
