Rainforest QA, the company replacing the QA team with a QA-as-a-Service platform, today announced it has raised $12 million in Series A funding led by BVP with participation from Rincon Venture Partners, Industry Ventures and Salesforce founder Marc Benioff. Byron Deeter, partner at BVP, will join Rainforest QA's board of directors.

'Even for the best, most successful software companies in our portfolio, QA is a huge pain point'
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In response to its 900 percent growth in 2015, Rainforest QA will use the investment to expand its mobile capabilities and offer new services for enterprise, in addition to growing its team from 36 people to 80 by 2017 and opening a headquarters in San Francisco.

'Today, to build world class software you need to build a world class QA team. We're working to make it so, just like with infrastructure, that no longer needs to be the case,' said Fred Stevens-Smith, co-founder and CEO of Rainforest QA. 'With this round of funding, we are continuing to work toward our goal of providing world class QA, on demand, so our customers can focus on what's important: building the best software.'

Nearly every software company relies on integration testing, which requires developers to monitor the early stages of development, but because most businesses want to ship code multiple times a day, QA quickly becomes a hurdle; especially manual QA, which requires real people to apply their intelligence to functional tests.

The Rainforest QA Platform eliminates the manual QA barrier, performing on-demand regression testing at the speed of automation by leveraging a crowd of 50 thousand testers. The platform takes a bionic approach, combining the human crowd with machine learning to drastically reduce the time it takes to do manual testing, with results often returned in less than 30 minutes, as compared to the hours, days or weeks it takes to do otherwise. The outcome is a faster turnaround, lower costs, more thorough coverage and a streamlined management process that enables continuous deployment.

'Our deployment schedule is unpredictable, to say the least. We deploy at all hours of the day and night, and need a QA platform that can keep up,' said Laks Srini, co-founder and CTO of Zenefits. 'Rainforest has been the key to our successful tests, empowering us to update and ship code 24x7 and allowing us to focus on building quality software, not managing testers.'

Rainforest launched in 2013 as a QA service running functional tests against a crowd from Amazon's Mechanical Turk. Since then, the company has scaled its QA-as-a-Service API to serve clients such as Zenefits, IBM, Lutron, Procore, Betterworks and Consumer Affairs, among others.

'Even for the best, most successful software companies in our portfolio, QA is a huge pain point,' said Byron Deeter, partner at BVP. 'We are in the unique position to have insight into these challenges, and are thrilled to support Rainforest in reinventing the way we see and experience QA.'

The Series A round of funding follows a $4 million seed round in 2015 from Storm Ventures, Rincon Venture Partners, Andreessen Horowitz, Morado and Crosslink. The latest round brings the company's total funding to $16 million.

About Rainforest QA

The Rainforest Continuous QA Platform provides on-demand manual QA-as-a-Service so that agile and continuous deployment teams can develop software quickly without compromising quality. Powered by 50 thousand qualified testers, the platform serves as a management tool for writing, running and getting manual QA results is less than 30 minutes so that companies can focus on building quality software, not managing individual testers. Full feature access is available via API to seamlessly incorporate the platform into your existing development workflow.