SmartBear, a Somerville-based provider of tools to develop, test and monitor software, announced on Wednesday that it has acquired Hiptest, a development platform for Agile and DevOps teams with offices in France and San Francisco.
All Hiptest employees, including the five co-founders, have joined SmartBear. The office of Hiptest in Besançon, France, will remain open and it will grow operations there.
The latest SmartBear acquisition dates back to 2016, when the company acquired another testing platform for cloud, CrossBrowserTesting. Also in that case, CrossBrowserTesting kept its Memphis headquarters open for future expansion.
As of August 2017, SmartBear had 175 employees in its Assembly Row office and other 175 employees working across the globe.
Francisco Partners, a technology-focused private equity firm with offices in San Francisco and London, acquired a majority stake in SmartBear in May 2017. Terms of the acquisition weren't disclosed, but a source told Xconomy that the transaction had an enterprise value of $410 million.
Hiptest's co-founders met in a kid’s playroom in a home in Besançon, a citadel near the French Alps, in 2015. They came up with an idea for a continuous testing platform that met the needs of Agile and DevOps teams to deliver software by collaborating on an idea, testing code continuously and generating living documentation. Currently, Hiptest is used by over 25,000 users in 140 counties.
“We felt strongly that SmartBear was the ideal partner for us moving forward because of our shared vision for empowering modern software development teams to go from idea to production, faster," Laurent Py, co-founder and CEO at Hiptest, said in a statement.
On the website of SmartBear, Hiptest is currently listed in the "products" drop-down menu, as part of the "software testing" product suite.
“Hiptest is an exciting, fast growing business, and is aligned with SmartBear's strategy of delivering easy-to-use and easy-to-consume tools in support of the software development lifecycle," Ryan Lloyd, vice president of products, test and development at SmartBear, said in a statement.
Terms of the acquisition will not be disclosed.
