The ursine software testing platform is growing again with its second acquisition this year.
Somerville-based SmartBear, now 10 years old, is set to acquire Bitbar, a 10-year-old DevOps company based in Helsinki, Finland. No financial terms were disclosed. Crunchbase puts Bitbar's value at about $3 million.
The move will allow SmartBear to "empower organizations to fully embrace automation in order to deliver higher quality software faster," the company wrote in a press release. Bitbar's mobile app test platforms will become part of SmartBear's growing product portfolio.
Earlier this year, SmartBear acquired Cucumber Ltd., a leader in the Behavior-Driven Development (BDD) community and provider of open source test automation framework “Cucumber.” Last year, SmartBear acquired two companies: Hiptest, a development platform for Agile and DevOps teams with offices in France and San Francisco, and Zephyr, a San Jose, Calif.-based software testing provider. (SmartBear itself was acquired by Francisco Partners in 2017; no financial terms were disclosed, but Xconomy reported that the deal was for $410 million.)
For Anand Sundaram, vice president of products at SmartBear, the deal with Bitbar builds on work started almost three years ago with the company's acquisition of CrossBrowserTesting (CBT), an automated cloud testing platform based in Tennessee.
"At that time, we realized a number of our traditional functional testing customers who were testing web apps have a need to make sure their software worked on different types of browsers," Sundaram said in a Q&A published on SmartBear's blog. "CBT presented us with an opportunity to solve that challenge for our customers. Jump to today, and there’s another important challenge to solve around native mobile apps. We looked at a handful of vendors in this space, but Bitbar really stood out to us because of their architecture, the flexibility they offer their customers, and the extensibility of their platform. It’s also a perfect complement to CBT."
