SOASTA grabs $30M and looks abroad to grow even more

SOASTA, one of the early players in the cloud-based load-testing category, has taken on $ 30 million in funding that will help the company gain business internationally.

Two new investors, Macquarie Capital and ROTH Capital, participated in SOASTA’s Series E round, along with previous investors Canaan Partners, Formative Ventures and Pelion Venture Partners. The company has now raised $ 63 million in total.

That’s a nice pool of money, and the company is in fact thinking about a public offering, which could come in 2015, CEO Tom Lounibos said.

SOASTA got started in 2006. At GigaOM’s Structure 08 conference it launched the CloudTest service for ensuring internet applications could handle lots of traffic. Other companies followed suit with similar products.

Last year SOASTA introduced the mPulse real-time monitoring tool and the TouchTest mobile testing service for web and native apps.

The big competitor for SOASTA is Hewlett-Packard with the LoadRunner testing software it got after acquiring Mercury Interactive for $ 4.5 billion in 2006. Compuware has an offering, as do smaller companies, such as Apica, BlazeMeter and LoadStorm. And open-source options are now available, too, including JCrawler.

Today customers include Best Buy, Mattel, Netflix and Western Union. Now the company wants to get some more foreign names into the mix. That shouldn’t be too hard given the appeal of the cloud deployment model and the gradual shift toward updating sites and apps more and more frequently to improve the user experience.

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