Tricentis Inc., a provider of tools that help developers more quickly test their software for bugs, today announced that it has raised $1.33 billion at a $4.5 billion valuation.

Private equity firm GTCR led the investment. The deal comes six years after Insight Partners acquired a majority stake in Tricentis for $165 million. Reports that the software maker could raise new funding first emerged in September. 

Manually testing every single feature of an application for bugs, performance hiccups and vulnerabilities is often impractical. As a result, developers create testing workflows that automatically scan their software for faulty code. Tricentis provides tools that make it easier to create such automated workflows.

The company’s flagship product, Tosca, can test a wide range of programs including web services, mobile apps and cloud workloads. The software finds bugs in not only an application’s user interface but also other components such as the connectors with which it retrieves data from external systems. Companies can test that every feature works as expected, as well as measure how fast the software responds to user input. 

Tricentis sells Tosca alongside more specialized test automation tools. There’s LiveCompare, which enterprises use to check changes to their SAP SE software environments for bugs. Another tool, Testim, eases the task of testing mobile and web applications.

The company also offers a number of other tools that make its core test automation products easier to use.

Software teams often maintain a library of automated tests that are each configured to search for a different type of bug. When developers update an application, they usually have to run only a small fraction of the automated tests created by their team. Tricentis provides a tool called SeaLights that identifies which tests are needed to evaluate a software update and skips the rest to save time. 

SeaLights became part of Tricentis’ product portfolio in June when it acquired the startup that developed the tool. With the new $1.33 billion investment from GTCR, the company could make more acquisitions to further expand its software lineup. 

The cash infusion will should enable Tricentis to accelerate its in-house product development efforts. Last year, the company launched a service called Device Cloud that provides access to mobile devices from Apple Inc., Samsung Electronics Co. Ltd. and other smartphone makers. Developers can use the hardware to test whether their mobile apps work consistently across different handsets. 

Tricentis disclosed on occasion of today’s funding milestone that it expects to end 2024 with $425 million in annual recurring revenue. That represents a year-over-year increase of 27%, which is better than the 20% growth the company posted in 2023. Tricentis generates its revenue from a customer base that includes more than 60% of the Fortune 500 and about 3,000 other organizations. 

Image: Tricentis