Applause Raises $43M to Test Apps, Hardware ‘In the Wild’
Context & Ripple Effects
Applause's $43M round arrives three years after Appcelerator raised $15M and became the largest third-party app publisher on iOS and Android — evidence that venture capital had already begun treating the mobile toolchain as a fundable stack, layer by layer. Applause extends that money from publishing into quality assurance, betting that apps and hardware need to be tested on real devices and networks rather than in-house labs.
The story traveled unusually far for a single funding round: VentureBeat, TechCrunch, Re/code, Gigaom, PE Hub and venturefizz all carried it on or about January 14, 2014, suggesting the investor and developer community sees outsourced 'in the wild' testing as a structural piece of the mobile economy, not a niche service.
First-order effects
- Applause gains the capital to scale its crowdsourced testing network across real-world devices and conditions, offering app and hardware makers an immediate alternative to maintaining their own device labs.
Second-order effects
- Publishers pushing apps across both iOS and Android — the multi-platform pattern Appcelerator embodied — face a growing device matrix, and budgets follow toward pay-per-test services instead of owned QA infrastructure.
Third-order effects
- If the funding cadence holds — publishing in 2011, testing in 2014 — software development keeps unbundling into specialized third-party platforms, with quality assurance becoming a purchased service rather than a department.
The trend: Venture capital is systematically funding each stage of mobile development as a standalone service, moving quality assurance out of the enterprise and into crowdsourced platforms.