App performance testing company BlazeMeter raises $6.5M

BlazeMeter will use the new funding to build up its mobile testing platform

BlazeMeter, a cloud self-service start up, has raised $6.5 million in Series A funding, the company revealed on Tuesday.

The round was led by previous investor YL Ventures  and joined by Glilot Capital Partners. BlazeMeter had previously raised $1.2 million in Seed funding  from YL Ventures in December 2011. This round brings the total raised to $8.7 million.

The San Francisco-based BlazeMeter is a performance testing as a service company, which enables enterprise organizations to deal with performance testing issues and requirements.

The commpany allow its customers to test apps during development, pior to production and in post production. It provide ways of make testing super easy, allowing one minute timed tests, with hundreds of iterations per day, as well as statistics and reporting.

Traditionally, the players in the space would charge a price tage of several hundreds thousands of dollars, and that was only for licensing, Alon Girmonsky, founder and CEO of BlazeMeter, told me. It also required the company to provide teams for performance engineering, who had to to build infrastructure, as well as maintain it, and run the tests.

"We provide a cloud service that can be used as a self service model," he said. "That saves money that companies spend on lincensing by 10 times. It also means they need less people to maintain it, taking a  team of 5 people and reducing it by three."

The company is also open source compatible, which allows developers to run tests themselves and save companies hundreds of thousands of dollars a year.

With the new money it has raised, BlazeMeter plans to use it to build out its team. Originally based in Israel, BlazeMeter currently has 30 people over there, and plans to add another 15, with the majority going towad research and development. 

BlazeMeter currently has only two people in its San Francisco office, including Girmonsky, but it plans to expand that to 10 by the end of the year, adding people in performancing testing support.

In addition, the new funding will be used to further develop BlazeMeter’s mobile testing platform, which Girmonsky says is increasingly becoming a larger part of the business.

"When we started a couple of years ago testing web apps, we had good traction, doing half a million tests for 50,000 users," he said. "Lately, though, there has been an increasing demand for testing mobile apps."

Whereas it used to be 95% Web, the majority of requests that BlazeMeter gets are now for mobile apps, with only 40% for Web. Of course, mobile apps are a different ballgame than Web apps, as they have "many moving parts, require different networks and there is less tolerance for a bad user experience."

BlazeMetere is not the only app testing platform out there, with HP Netsuite and SOASTA competing with it directly. So what separates the company from the competition? Its open source platform, said Girmonsky.

"Open source is a truly agile platform, and it enables organiztions too become agile as well," he said. It makes it so easy, and means it it truly on demand. It also means there is no educatin curve, no need to learn anything, or lock into any vendor."

Testing has moved to the development lifecycle, he told me, and "we plan to contribute to manage the testing procress by releasing a platform that will allow organizations to manage all the resources, all the users and all of the pcorsses, including all of their information and everythubg across the organization."

(Image source: blazemeter.com)