existing Series A and B investors—Longworth Venture Partners and Egan-Managed Capital—also participated in the new funding round.
It probably helped that Wienbar already had her eye on the crowdsourcing sector. “It’s an area where we did substantial research starting in 2008,” she says. “We identified literally 200 companies across dozens of service sectors. There are a handful of companies that are really hitting their stride now, uTest being one of the leaders. They have the right model for delivering something that creates value both for the end user and for the community.”
UTest is recruiting new testers at a rate of 1,000 a month. And it’s earning its community’s loyalty: As I wrote recently, the company’s own testers helped it survived a bookkeeping snafu in which it paid all of its testers twice for their work in the first half of May. Not only was the payment bug first diagnosed by the testers themselves, but 99.5 percent voluntarily returned their overpayments within 48 hours of the glitch.
“These aren’t kids working after school. The vast majority of the testers have either a bachelor’s or a master’s degree in a technical field, and have worked as professional testers,” says Wienbar. “So uTest is bringing to bear the right kind of people to deliver a high-quality service. And they’ve invested a lot in the software layer to make sure that customers’ projects get turned around quickly—which is very important when software development methodology has changed to agile coding, where companies are doing a major release every week.”
UTest will use part of its new round to staff up its Silicon Valley office, whose team of six is set to grow to 15 by the end of the year. “We’re hiring everything from project management to sales to engineering to marketing,” says Matt Johnston, uTest’s vice president of marketing. The company also plans to invest in developing application programming interfaces that allow third parties—even non-customers—to tap into uTest’s crowdsourcing platform and use it to manage their own internal and external QA testing teams.
Compare this story to:
uTest Lands $13 Million For Software Testing Marketplace (TechCrunch)
Software testing startup uTest lands $13M financing (Mass High Tech)
