SeaLights, a software quality company, has raised $8.6 million in new funding. Cisco led the round, and Wipro Ventures, the strategic investment arm of Wipro Limited, joined as a new investor. The company announced the deal on January 28, 2020, from Washington, D.C.
The money will go toward sales and engineering, while part of it will fund new platform features. According to Israeli business press, the round brought total funding to nearly $20 million.
At the same time, SeaLights is promoting a recently launched product called Intelligent Test Execution. The tool uses AI to work out which tests actually need to run after a code change, and then runs only those. As a result, test and build cycles get shorter. The company says release speed can rise by more than 90 percent. In turn, DevOps teams can reach continuous delivery at enterprise scale.
According to CEO and co-founder Eran Sher, large IT organizations have spent heavily on digital transformation and the cloud. Even so, he added, balancing release speed against long testing cycles is still a bottleneck. Still, he said the team was excited about the Cisco investment.
The investors offered their own views. Adam Leftik, a vice president at Cisco’s AppDynamics, said companies now need visibility across development and test. That way, he explained, risks can be caught before production. Arun Melkote of Wipro said the platform helps clients move from QA to quality engineering. He pointed to a global electronics maker that, with Wipro’s help, adopted SeaLights and cut test effort by 60 percent.
SeaLights describes itself as a Quality Intelligence Platform that applies AI to software delivery. Its products include Intelligent Test Execution, Quality Risk and Release Analytics. They are built to fit into existing team workflows. Gartner named the company a Cool Vendor in Application Development and Platforms in May 2019.
Founded in 2015, the company is based in Kfar Saba, Israel, and also has an office in Arlington, Virginia. Its enterprise customers include Fortune 500 firms in banking, insurance, retail, telecom, health, cybersecurity and media.
