Bitbar Raises €2.28 Million To Expand Mobile Device Testing

    €2.28 million ($3 million) seems to be a popular financing figure, as today Bitbar joins Nosto with a fresh influx of cash. Bitbar produces testing solutions using real mobile phone and tablet hardware, being sure that apps and websites are loading as the developer intended on mobile devices. Bitbar announced seed funding just about a year ago.

    The newly announced round was led by Creathor Venture (Frankfurt, Germany), DFJ Esprit (London), Finnvera Venture Capital (Finland), and Qualcomm Incorporated, acting through its venture investment group, Qualcomm Ventures, with additional funding from TEKES financing.

    Bitbar offers some neat technology to assist developers building apps for the fragmented Android market. Unlike Apple’s choice of two different phone sizes to develop for, the Android market has nearly as many screen dimensions as there are phones. That’s a bit of an overstatement, but the point is that proper testing needs to be in place to be sure apps look and work correctly across Android devices.

    The Helsinki-based company offers a few products to help customers. The main product is Testdroid Cloud, which, allows you to test and run user actions on real devices linked up using Bitbar’s technology. To build that testing script, you can use Testdroid Recorder, a tool for recording user actions and generating reusable Android JUnit test scripts. And finally, larger enterprise organizations don’t want their betas flying all over the web, so Bitbar also offers an enterprise solution that brings their fast testing technology in-house.

    The alternative to all of this is something like Helsinki’s Open Device Lab, or having a number of devices where you can boot up your app on devices and test it out yourself. But that’s a time consuming and labor intensive process, and its tough to find labs that have the latest devices.

    “We are witnessing the renaissance of the mobile developer,” says Marko Kaasila, CEO, Bitbar. “We have seen more than 40 percent month-to-month growth on new users and more than 50 percent growth in monthly revenues. This financing round will allow us to grow our platform even further and provide our customers with a fully integrated development, testing and deployment experience for all relevant mobile platforms.”

    Growth is good, and the product is pretty scalable, so this cash is being put into place to help Bitbar open an office in Silicon Valley, where they can be closer to about 70% of their customers.

    In addition, Bitbar is expanding beyond just testing, and will slowly be releasing a few new features here and there to help developers in the development creation and testing process. Jouko Kaasila of Bitbar clarifies that this isn’t another cross-platform development solution, but they see the mobile tool chain as fragmented as web development was 10 years ago, and they feel the process needs to be more streamlined.

    We also hear that Bitbar is adding iPhone support, and is adding devices constantly. We last covered Bitbar a year ago, so they’re worth checking out again if you haven’t done so since then.