Skytap Raises $35M For Its Cloud-Based Enterprise Development And Testing Service
Frederic Lardinois / TechCrunch :
Context & Ripple Effects
Skytap's $35M raise lands in the middle of a funding run for cloud-based development and testing infrastructure: two years later the company would return for a $45M Series E led by Goldman Sachs, this time pitching itself as a way to move legacy apps to the cloud rather than just test them.
The competitive set was raising in parallel — Sauce Labs brought in $70M from Centerview Capital Technology and IVP in 2016 on its way to $101M total — signaling that investors saw enterprise testing as a durable category worth multiple large bets.
First-order effects
- Skytap gains capital to scale its enterprise development-and-testing service at exactly the moment rivals like Sauce Labs are also well-funded, making sales capacity and enterprise credibility the immediate battleground.
Second-order effects
- Competitors face pressure to match the raise with their own larger rounds or broaden beyond pure testing — a path Skytap itself took with the legacy-app migration pitch of its Goldman-led Series E.
Third-order effects
- If sustained funding holds, cloud development-and-testing consolidates into a few capitalized platforms, squeezing out sub-scale point tools and pushing buyers toward bundled environments rather than standalone test services.
The trend: Enterprise software testing is migrating from on-premises lab setups to cloud-delivered platforms, with successive venture rounds determining which vendors survive the consolidation.