BrowserStack wins Deque lawsuit as U.S. court dismisses all claims

Nitesh Arora, CEO and co-founder of BrowserStack
Nitesh Arora, CEO and co-founder of BrowserStack

In a major legal development today, the United States District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia has dismissed all legal claims against BrowserStack that were brought against the web and mobile testing tech provider by one its main rivals, software test equipment firm Deque Systems.

The lawsuit, which centered around BrowserStack’s accessibility testing solutions, was resolved in BrowserStack’s favour without the need for a trial, according to a statement issued today.

The court found insufficient evidence to support Deque’s allegations of copyright infringement, breach of contract, and false advertising.

Responding to the verdict, Ritesh Arora, chief executive officer of BrowserStack and one of its co-founders, said that “this ruling validates our unwavering commitment to ethical innovation and original product development.”

He stressed that “while we respect Deque’s contributions to digital accessibility, we are gratified that the court recognized the independence and legitimacy of our technology.”

Also weighing in, Vikash Sureka, CFO of BrowserStack declared that “from the outset, BrowserStack actively sought to mediate and resolve this matter on mutually fair terms.”

“Unfortunately, Deque chose to continue legal proceedings, extending the dispute far longer than necessary.”

2024 lawsuit

Deque Systems, seen as one of BrowserStack’s main rivals, filed the lawsuit in 2024 in the U.S. over the use of one of its testing platforms.

Deque Systems reportedly alleged that BrowserStack acquired Deque’s proprietary testing platform DevTools, only for it to be taken apart and directly access its codes.

The codes, as Deque Systems claims, were then duplicated in order to develop BrowserStack’s own testing tool, which was subsequently launched and brought to market by BrowserStack at the end of 2023.

“When we looked at the extent of the copying, the theft was intentional, pervasive, blatant and frankly, really shameless,” claimed Preety Kumar last year, who is the CEO and founder of Deque Systems.

“So they even use their work emails, with ‘browserstack.com’ when they signed up for our trials [so] we have decided that we’re going to have to vigorously defend our intellectual property rights,” Kumar stated.

Deque Systems develops accessibility software and testing tools and is used by a range of large U.S. banks, including PNC Financial services and U.S. Bancorp.

Preety Kumar

“Right the wrong, stop stealing and selling things based on what you have stolen from us,” Kumar told various outlets at the beginning of last year.

She said Deque Systems spent more than five years developing the testing platform and stressed designing efforts evolved around ensuring that the product remains usable for novice users and still be compatible with algorithms at the backend.

“Some of the questions that are in BrowserStack’s product are verbatim stolen questions from our product, as well as in addition to some of the code that they saw,” Kumar claimed.

At the time BrowserStack allegedly signed up “for hundreds of accounts”, as she put it, Deque Systems’ product was in beta first.

When Deque subsequently launched the software product, it drastically limited the option to use it during a free trial.

It was then however, according to Kumar, that BrowserStack attempted to sign up for a subscription with a generic email like “test@browserstack.com”.

Deque objected since such a generic email meant the account would be open to many multiple users. In response, BrowserStack acquired a range of subscriptions from Deque Systems, which allowed them access to the entire product.

Kumar stressed last year it is the first time ever Deque Systems has filed such a large lawsuit. When approached by QA Financial, Deque Systems declined to discuss the U.S. court ruling.

Bitrise deal

BrowserStack is one of the most-used software testing firms in the banking and financial services space, particularly across North America. Among its prominent finserv clients are Wells Fargo, Capital One, Stripe and Mastercard.

BrowserStack, which is venture capital-backed and was recently valued at around $4 billion, has been profitable since its inception.

The legal victory for BrowserStack comes as the firm struck a partnership with London-based Bitrise, a mobile DevOps platform, aimed at giving mobile app testing a shot in the arm.

More specifically, the collaboration is aimed at improving mobile app quality assurance. A host of banking clients and other financial services platforms are expected to embrace the enhanced capability, as they increasingly offer most of their traditional banking services via digital platforms and mobile applications.

As part of the agreement, developers and QA teams that use BrowserStack’s App Automate will receive 15,000 free credits when signing up for Bitrise services, thereby gaining access to the latter’s mobile app testing solutions.

“As mobile app development becomes increasingly complex, development teams face mounting challenges in ensuring test coverage across a wide array of devices, operating systems, and configurations,” explained Nakul Aggarwal, the chief technology officer of BrowserStack.


“The fragmented nature of testing tools can hinder efficiency, forcing teams to use multiple solutions and slowing down release timelines.”

– Nakul Aggarwal


Aggarwal, who is also one of the company’s co-founder, claimed that this new collaboration “helps solve this by allowing teams to run thousands of tests simultaneously across different devices, streamlining the testing process and enabling faster, higher-quality releases.”

In fact, he called the partnership “a key step in delivering a test platform that integrates with modern workflows. Teams need reliable and efficient solutions to keep up with the pace of mobile app development.”

As part of the deal, the collaboration between BrowserStack and Bitrise also means both entities will work to drive innovation in mobile development by combining their expertise integration/continuous deployment and cloud-based testing.

Barnabás Birmacher

The firm has rapidly expanded its product portfolio in recent years, to include over 15 products, with ten alone launching in the last 18 months.

That is exactly why Barnabás Birmacher, who is the founder and CEO of Bitrise, expressed his excitement about the partnership’s potential.

“This is a rare opportunity to partner with a brand that shares our commitment to helping teams improve the mobile experience,” he shared.

“The integrated platform will allow teams to develop and deliver high-quality apps at a faster pace, helping to meet the growing demands of the mobile industry,” Birmacher claimed.

Founded in 2014 in London, Bitrise is backed by investmentfirms Insight Partners and Y Combinator. It is a mobile DevOps platform that supports a host of different companies and brands, mostly in financial services, retail and e-commerce.

Its “full-stack platform unites mobile development tools, processes, and testing frameworks, enabling engineering teams to deliver mobile experiences,” the company states on its webiste. Bitrise claims its testing platform is used by over 400,000 developers worldwide.

Busy year

The partnership means BrowserStacks’ first major move so far this year. 2024 was a busy year for the company with a range of product launches.

It most recently developed and launched a new test automation platform that is low code based as the firm is increasingly focuses on automation because software teams face critical challenges, Aggarwal explained.

He singled out issues such as slow manual testing cycles bottleneck releases and traditional automation tools like Selenium require steep learning curves with long ramp-up periods before showing ROI.

Nakul Aggarwal
Nakul Aggarwal

For that reason, many financial organisations and other firms struggle with a shortage of automation engineers while talented testers lack coding skills, Aggarwall added.

“AI is further revolutionizing how test automation is done,” he continued, so “our low-code automation eliminates these barriers, enabling to create and maintain AI-driven automated tests without code.”

In fact, Aggarwal went on to claim that “with low code automation, we’re transforming how teams approach quality assurance, [because] by empowering everyone to create automated tests, we’re enabling a true culture of quality.”

He was keen to point out that the platform stands out because of its “intuitive test recorder with no learning curve”, which can build tests in minutes by interacting with webapps in a browser.

Moreover, the solution simplifies complex assertions into a one-click visual validation and contains AI-driven self-healing tests that adapt to UI changes and reduce failures by up to 40%, Aggarwal explained.

Acquisitive strategy

BrowserStack, which is venture capital-backed, has been on somewhat of a shopping spree in recent years. The company’s latest buy, Bird Eats Bug in August of 2024, marked BrowserStack’s fifth acquisition since Percy, a visual testing platform, in 2020.

Bird Eats Bug is a bug reporting platform based in Berlin. BrowserStack is currently in the process of integrating Bird Eats Bug’s capabilities into its existing QA ecosystem, culminating in the launch of Bug Capture, a new solution for manual testing.

“The acquisition not only aligned with BrowserStack’s vision of creating a developer-first end-to-end test platform but also underscored its urgent need to resolve gaps in bug-reporting processes and eliminate fragmented toolchains in testing,” stressed CEO Arora.

He went on to say that “by integrating Bug Capture’s approach to bug reporting into our platform, we’re not just streamlining workflows; we’re boosting development teams’ productivity so they can focus more on building great products and less on managing the intricacies of the testing process.”

Current software development suffers from inefficiencies in bug-reporting processes. Bug Capture allows teams to debug issues 30% faster on average, Arora claimed.

He said the key features include instant replays, screen recording, and auto-captured technical logs, such as console and network logs, system details, and steps to reproduce, “all consolidated into one clean bug report.”

“These features work in harmony to eliminate the need for extensive back-and-forth between testers, product managers, developers, support teams, and customers,” Arora concluded.


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