mabl

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Founders: Izzy Azeri, Dan Belcher
Founding: 2016
Mission: Transform your Software Quality with Modern Test Automation
Employees: 90 & ~50% Local
Workplace: Hybrid
Stage & Capital Raised: Series C & $77M raised
Investors: Amplify Partners, CRV, GV, Presidio Ventures, Vista Growth Equity
Key Customers: Electronic Arts, Liberty Mutual, JetBlue, InvestCloud, Microsoft, Workday
Glassdoor Rating: 3.8
Valuation (estimated): $400M (assuming average valuation math from the Q4 ‘21 $40M Series C fundraise)
^ this is a useless number from MGMT Boston. There is no tangible valuation until the business is sold or goes public. Don’t forget it!

mabl is building intelligent, AI-powered software automation technology to help more team members uplevel the quality of their code. This growth stage company is building a unified platform to streamline testing across web, mobile, API, accessibility, and performance to bring innovation to QA testing because all software should be shipped quickly with enterprise level quality.

Izzy Azeri & Dan Belcher worked together at VMware before starting an application performance monitoring company called Stackdriver which was acquired by Google in 2014 after just 2 years. The duo had a passion for helping developers and building tooling to make them more successful. 

While at Google, they had a really unique high level view of the evolution of the software industry and developer tooling. Izzy & Dan had access to countless VPs of Engineering and software development leaders. New platforms like GitHub & GitLab were compressing code development from quarters to hours. 

But QA infrastructure had not kept pace. They never envisioned their fist company would be acquired so soon and always envisioned building a lasting company in the Boston startup ecosystem. They wanted to bring the same successful mindset from Stackdriver to solve another big problem in a similar space.

The global testing (QA) market is $38B growing to $90B by 2030 (src). It’s a broad category and lots will change, but the need for high performance software…will likely not. Most of the “best in class” tooling has traditionally been open source and offered via legacy players. 

Modern QA tooling has not kept pace with software development velocity and quality has suffered. mabl’s vision is to consolidate and democratize all testing across web & mobile and their various application interfaces.

In one recent case, Figma Founder & CEO Dylan Field had to come out and apologize for their new Make Design AI feature release that was returning results very similar to competitor apps due to a failure in their internal QA process. In his words: “Ultimately it is my fault for not insisting on a better QA process for this work and pushing our team hard to hit a deadline for Config.”

Hey, I know a startup who can help..

mabl was founded to help more enterprises & team members maintain a high quality QA process. This growth stage team has been laser focused over the past year in investing to round out their unified platform vision, releasing a brand new mobile product this spring (after 13 months in development) to augment their existing top notch browser capabilities.

Their solution is important to any company that has software applications which are strategic to their business or customer facing, revenue generating applications. Most businesses in the world at this point, don’t ya think?

When they originally built the platform, there was a skills gap with QA testers. The choice was made to build mabl as a “low code”, machine learning native platform to more easily democratize testing. What they used to call AI! In the years since, they’ve checked all the boxes of rounding out their capabilities and are now deepening customer use cases and mobile testing.

From a performance standpoint, they are focused on coverage (web, mobile, API, accessibility, etc), scalability (from startup to F500), and integration (with more customer tools to streamline collaboration).

mabl customers include Series A startups all the way up to F500 companies like Charles Schwab & JetBlue. Their model is usage based, with test credits to support different use cases, aligning with traditional modern cloud pricing models. They have a very passionate customer base of 300+ with clients across verticals with household names like Fox Network Group, Stackoverflow, Priceline, JetBlue, NTT Data, and more.

Now, LLMs are helping the team close the “last mile” of test integration to better query testing scenarios like “what happens if you rename the blue button on the screen”? They are making test creation even easier by leveraging AI models to more thoroughly catch bugs & gaps before code pushes to production.

mabl has continued to grow by double digits year over year through the downturn and Q1 2024 was their largest net new revenue quarter in the company’s history. The volume of work they’ve been putting in has been coming to fruition. Good for mabl, good for the industry, and good for Boston!

Operators to Know (Locally):

My investigative powers continue to need work so apologies to the mabl team I know I missed many up & coming operators internally

Key Roles To Be Hired:

If I were interviewing here are some questions I’d ask:

  • What is mabl focused on in 2H 2024?
  • What are the biggest challenges as you continue to build the team & company? 
  • What is the long term vision for mabl?
  • How has the Generative AI explosion changed your strategy?

We’re optimizing for readability here so to learn more about mabl you’ll have to D.Y.O.R. I’m excited to watch this team bring more QA into the digital age. All software developers & consumers applaud your efforts. See you around town!

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