LambdaTest’s Phenomenal Journey From An Underdog In Cross-Browser Testing To “AWS For Testers”

When we first met Asad Khan and Jay Singh, we saw two individuals who didn’t just have a great product and traction in cross-browser testing, but also had a strong vision around how to actually go about building an end-to-end test execution and test orchestration platform to drive cloud testing at scale – In a lot of ways, LambdaTest is enabling an open testing ecosystem to help developers and testers run their tests at scale across any language and framework from anywhere in the world.

Asad has been a part of the testing ecosystem for over 15 years and has witnessed some of the most pivotal evolutions in the industry across tools, methodologies, languages and frameworks. At the same time, he has successfully scaled and exited a testing services company before jumping into a problem that he was deeply passionate about – Making testing frictionless for developers and testers and building an open ecosystem for test execution. With all the learning, he not only had a mental model of how to bridge the gaps that he had observed in the software testing ecosystem, but also how to make the testing industry leapfrog in its evolution.

On the heels of LambdaTest’s latest funding round of $45M led by Premji Invest with participation by Blume Ventures, the team launched HyperExecute and Test-at-Scale (TAS) to further expand their product offerings. In a nutshell, HyperExecute is a test orchestration platform that enables end-to-end Selenium tests at speeds 70% faster than a traditional Selenium grid cloud. Test-at-Scale, on the other hand, is a test intelligence platform that helps with getting visibility into relevant KPIs of tests, and much more importantly enables smart test selection, which ensures that only a relevant subset of tests are run to drive a 95% reduction in test durations. With these two products to drive tests at speeds never seen before and enable intelligent testing, LambdaTest has been enabling companies to shift-left their testing. 

As an investor who has had the opportunity to be a fly on the wall and observe LambdaTest’s evolution to a test orchestration platform enabling an open ecosystem for developers and testers, there are few observations about the way Asad and Jay have built the company that has stood out for us: 

Missionary Obsession with the problems and friction faced by Developers and Testers 

Over a million developers and testers across 130+ nations use their platform. However, this kind of phenomenal growth and success wouldn’t have ever been possible without being absolutely obsessed with their end users’ needs and removing every friction their users faced. They recognized very early on that to shrink the development cycles, which is one of the critical KPIs of software teams, it was imperative to have a secure, reliable, fast and scalable  infrastructure.  Quick bug detection meant faster developer feedback leading to significant cost savings and better customer experience. In short, the LambdaTest team very early on in their product vision realized the need to move towards continuous testing. 

Additionally, there was a huge focus on reducing the Time to Value for users so that they can experience their products in a matter of less than a minute, which drove phenomenal adoption. Their 1M+ developers/testers have run over 100 million tests, achieved 95% quicker time-to-market, increased release productivity by 62%, and identified 67% of issues prior to launch, and at the same time, the ARR of Lambdatest has grown 3x every year since 2019!

While the goal was to enable the shift-left approach, there was a huge focus on ensuring the LambdaTest platform and infrastructure could be operated by every developer irrespective of language, frameworks and tools they use. Over the past few years, Lambdatest has built out over 120+ integrations with various products and, has offerings across frameworks like Selenium and Cypress – All with the focus on creating an open ecosystem for test execution and to ensure that developers/testers have the most seamless experience in executing tests! 

Balancing act between a Bottoms up and Top-Down GTM strategy

LambdaTest is the poster child of driving product-led-growth out of India – whether it is reducing Time To Value (TTV), having a freemium product, driving adoption by educating developers and testers through their phenomenal content around testing and building a super-strong community that loves their product, they have done it all! 

This approach has driven phenomenal adoption with 1M+ developers & testers using their platform. At the same time though, they have struck the right balance by catering to the needs of enterprises that require scale. They have onboarded some of the largest enterprises worldwide and implemented robust sales & support practices to cater to enterprise customers’ needs and continue striking the right balance between a bottom-up and top-down sales strategy. 

Building the best team possible and rewarding people for their contributions

The kind of camaraderie that you see in the LambdaTest team is second to none, and this has been created by hiring some of the best talents in the industry with the motivation to build a deep tech software solution from India for the Globe. I distinctly remember Asad’s statement before they raised their Series A about how he would consider all his efforts a failure if the key contributors from the team don’t have asymmetric growth in their capabilities, aspirations and wealth. The very fact that Mayank Bhola, one of the key engineering brains in the company, was recently promoted to Co-founder and Head of Products, bears testimony to how both Asad and Jay walk the talk on how they want every single member of the team to reap the benefits of the company’s success. 

What started as a cross-browsing testing platform, within 3-4 years has evolved into multiple product lines that cover everything from manual testing, automation testing, real device testing, test intelligence, and speed of test execution. We strongly believe that Asad, Jay and Mayank are just getting started and are very close to realizing their vision of becoming the market leader in cloud testing, empowering 30 million developers with testing and shipping their code at speeds never seen before while maintaining quality never experienced before. We at Blume Ventures are fortunate to have had the opportunity to partner with the team and are looking forward to the AWS for testers being built out of India for the Globe!