testRigor scores $4M seed to turn a list of actions into a QA testing script

Imagine typing out of a series of steps in plain English that would reflect a list of actions a human QA tester would undertake to test an app, then turning that list into an automated testing script. That’s exactly what testRigor, a member of the Y Combinator Summer 2021 cohort has done. Today the early stage startup announced a $4.1 million seed round.

Investors include FlashPoint VC, Y Combinator, PTV, Phystech Ventures and several individuals. The company previously raised a $300,000 angel investment and a $700,000 pre-seed investment for a total of $5.1 million raised to this point.

The beauty of testRigor is that you can type out a series of steps like “Click the Start button” or “Click the Stop button” and testRigor turns this into code, automatically runs the script and reports back whether the application has passed or failed.

“So it executes your instructions, and then will give you basically a pass or fail at the end. If it fails, it tells you what the issues were, allowing you to create a JIRA ticket and fix it in place or showing what the steps are to reproduce the issue. […] And this is actually where we bring the most value,” co-founder and CEO Artem Golubev explained.

To make this process even simpler, the company has created a Chrome extension for recording testing steps, and it also will create tests automatically based on analytics that determine how people use the app, testing the most popular features.

They call the latter feature behavioral testing. “We literally deploy our analytics script in production, and then the system will automatically [build a test] based on how your end users are using your application in production,” he said.

The company has around 100 customers including Netflix and other Fortune 500 companies along with 22 employees, 12 of whom were hired this year. Golubev hopes to have 30 in place by the end of the year. He says that hiring people has been a challenge, and one of the reasons he joined Y Combinator was to get help in that area.

“I’m running around trying to solve this problem of hiring people, and we saw YC being helpful in this area. Our number one largest problem is we can’t hire quickly enough,” he said. He believes that being part of YC has indeed helped in this regard.

In spite of the hiring challenge he’s facing, he believes that you need to hire a diverse workforce and reports that around 40% of his 22 employees are women. He says that he believes a lot of companies are missing out on good people because of their own biases. “What I have seen is that people have such a huge bias, they’re missing out on very talented people who don’t match their kind of imaginary profile,” he said.

Golubev says that he launched pre-COVID as a remote company, and he believed that once he got funding like this round, he would open an office, but now he’s determined to be 100% remote and sees GitLab, a fully remote company, as a model for him as he grows his company.