QA Wolf Inc., a startup that helps enterprises find and fix flaws in their software, has raised $36 million from investors to support its growth efforts.

The Seattle-based company announced the Series B round today. Scale Venture Partners led the raise, joined by Threshold Ventures, Ventureforgood, Inspired Capital and Notation Capital.

Software teams test the reliability of newly created applications by simulating user activity. The developers of a new e-commerce website, for example, might carry out a series of simulated purchases to verify that the checkout menu works as expected. Software teams don’t perform such tests manually but rather write scripts that automatically click through the different sections of an application’s interface.

Automating the quality assurance workflow speeds it up considerably, but creating the scripts needed for the task still involves a significant amount of time and effort. As a result, software testing can account for a sizable percentage of an application project’s budget. The updates that developers release for a service over time must be tested as well, which incurs further costs.

QA Wolf is working to reduce companies’ quality assurance expenses. It performs software testing tasks on enterprise customers’ behalf to save time for their in-house developers and thereby streamline application projects. According to the company, its service can reduce the percentage of a software team’s budget that goes to quality assurance by a factor of five.

When a customer submits an application to QA Wolf for evaluation, its engineers write a collection of scripts to test the application’s features. The company can develop up to thousands of tests for a project if necessary. It runs its scripts using Playwright, an open-source tool created by Microsoft Corp. to reduce the amount of manual work involved in application reliability reviews.

Before it launches a round of software tests, QA Wolf submits a natural language description of the proposed evaluation to the customer for review. After receiving the go-ahead, the company runs the tests on a Kubernetes-powered cloud environment it built specifically for the task. The tests are carried out in parallel rather than one after one after another to speed up the workflow.

In some cases, the scripts that a company uses to review application code can encounter technical issues. QA Wolf says it uses artificial intelligence to detect such malfunctions in its tests. The AI also generates troubleshooting suggestions for the company’s engineers.

After concluding an application testing project, QA Wolf sends a report detailing the bugs it found to the customer. Its engineers provide an explanation of each issue to speed up the remediation process for companies’ in-house development teams.

In addition to reducing testing costs, QA Wolf says, its service can help enterprises more thoroughly evaluate their applications than would otherwise be possible. The company is promising test coverage of at least 80% for the application it evaluates. Test coverage is a metric used to measure the percentage of an application’s features that were thoroughly evaluated during the quality assurance process.

QA Wolf currently focuses mainly on testing web applications. Using the $36 million funding round it announced today, the company will launch a new service for testing Android and iOS apps. It also plans to grow its 140-person workforce. 

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