A company that specializes in creating testing tools for enterprise software development just hit the vencap jackpot, hauling in $165 million in Series B financing.

Vienna-based Tricentis, founded in 2009, started as a testing operation, but in recent years began developing its own tools for testing and evaluating software in agile/DevOps development environments. This part of the market is known as "continuous test."

Relatively tiny compared to its best-known rivals, Tricentis attracted attention by popping up cheek-by-jowl with IBM and Hewlett Packard Enterprise among the leaders in Gartner's Magic Quadrant for the software test market the last two years running. Forrester has also ranked Tricentis highly.

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The company's claim to fame is the extent to which it has automated its process. It says that with its own tools it achieves software testing automation rates of more than 90%. Previously, using tools developed by others, it wasn't getting to 20%, it said in a blog post announcing the investment.

The company has a client list of over 400 customers that includes HBO, Whole Foods, Toyota, Allianz, BMW, Starbucks, Deutsche Bank, Lexmark, Orange and UBS.

The only participant in the round was Insight Venture Partners. In 2012, Tricentis received $9 million in its Series A. Insight Venture Partners bought out the earlier investor.

Tricentis has been putting together an annual report that tallies the number of publicly reported software failures and the estimated monetary damages associated with them. In its most recent report, released last week, scanning just English-language sources, the company found 548 recorded software fails impacting 4.4 billion people and $1.1 trillion in assets. You can download the report here.

Insight Managing Director Mike Triplett will join Tricentis' board of directors. In a statement he said, "Software quality testing has traditionally required a large amount of time and manual effort, forcing compromises between speed, scope of testing, and quality of testing. To reduce time to market and improve software quality, organizations are abandoning monolithic testing solutions, and turning to Tricentis."

— Brian Santo, Senior Editor, Components, T&M, Light Reading

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