What is Applitools planning in 2026? Best known for its visual testing platform, the Israel-founded and California-headquartered testing business was acquired by private equity firm Thoma Bravo in 2021.
In Forrester’s 2025 Wave report on autonomous testing platforms, released earlier this month, the research firm credits Applitools as a ‘strong performer’ with a product that is ideal for customers seeking ‘pixel-perfect UIs’, but the firm does ‘lack shift-left performance testing’.
Applitools appointed Anand Sundaram as its new CEO in October of this year, replacing Alex Berry who in September took up a new job leading Seerist, the risk intelligence platform.
Sundaram was previously senior vice president of product at CloudZero, the cloud cost management platform, and before that CTO at SmartBear, the DevOps and testing tools vendor.
QA Financial sat down with Sundaram recently to ask about his strategy for growth over the coming year – one which will surely be defined by customers’ continued adoption of genAI and agentic AI DevOps tooling.
QA Financial: Tell us about your time at SmartBear and how you came to your new role at Applitools.
Anand Sundaram: I was at SmartBear for over eight years. I was responsible for two of the four business units – the observability and the test business units. One of the gaps we had was around visual testing. I had a relationship with Applitools: I knew the founders. We really wanted to acquire them but we just couldn’t afford them. They were just too darn good and too hot. That admiration for the technology continued, and I ended up helping to seed and build a visual AI regression testing product at SmartBear. We just needed to make sure that we could say, yes, we did it, albeit not even close to what Applitools does.
After I left SmartBear I kept in touch and had a conversation with Thoma Bravo [the private equity firm that owns Applitools], which really wanted someone for Applitools who understood the test space, who is a technologist, who is product-oriented, and who could really drive the next level of growth, partnering with Adam Carmi, the founder and CTO. Adam is phenomenal – he’s a force of nature. They wanted to marry go-to-market motion with Adam’s pioneering ability and it felt like the right time. Applitools has blazed a trail in AI long before AI was ‘a thing’ and this is our opportunity to really help organizations as they start to consume a lot of AI all across their SDLC.
So what are your key objectives for Applitools? And how would you sum up the proposition?
Applitools will be the AI-native user experience testing platform. That’s at our core. We are focused on the spaces where we do incredibly well, but also to extend our footprint to do more. The objective is to pick the spaces we can compete in, where we differentiate, and even more importantly, deliver value. Today, we cater to developers and automation engineers who program. They are also starting to embrace AI in terms of generating code; generating test plans and scripts; generating test requirements; generating test data.
The ‘old’ model is to use AI to generate code; see how it works and then use it to build your software, whether that’s for automated testing or for the actual application. With our Autonomous product, we have a slightly different take. Our approach is: Hey, you don’t need to necessarily write the code to drive the application through the testing phases or to ensure functional correctness, or to produce the assertions for the visual regression, or even for compliance and other related aspects.
“What we want to do in the next 12 months is to take the success we’ve had in the areas where we deliver value today … It will be an incremental and adjacent growth.”
– Anand Sundaram
We believe that you can use natural language in much the same way as you give prompts to your LLMs to generate code for the applications you’re building. Our approach is analogous to that and the autonomous product that we’re building – that’s starting to see a lot of success – has that at its core. We think that we can start to help organizations drive the use of AI with our model using just prompts.
That reduces the burden of creating code and maintaining code, and really helps to keep up with the changes that organisations are going through as they look to deploy faster and faster. That is our big opportunity. We have built from the ground up a deterministic hallucination-free model that is very secure and which helps you understand what AI-based user experience testing could look like. And it could easily extend over time to API testing, to accessibility testing and other needs an organization has when it is trying to deploy an app or a website and there is an element of user experience that you care about. That’s the secret sauce, and that’s what we’re invested in.
You’ve described what is potentially a very broad product. There are other test automation vendors that have scaled-up through acquisitions. What will be your competitive edge against them?
It’s a long journey and there’s a lot more to do. But we are being careful to pick the adjacencies to where we play today, so that we can establish a broader footprint and add to it, over time. There are two aspects to what we do right now. We do AI and ML. There is an element of our true visual regression platform that is primarily ML-based. That’s a compelling part of the offering and it has been true and tried. It’s very secure – we don’t train it on customers’ data – and that’s one of the reasons why we have had the success we’ve had.
What we want to do in the next 12 months is to take the success we’ve had in the areas where we deliver value today, particularly in banking, financial services, pharma, healthcare; all the places where they truly care about the user experience, and where business value is lost if you compromise UX – or where there could be compliance implication – and we are going to extend the footprint to do more. It will be an incremental and adjacent growth.
There’s a tremendous amount of investment in AI, across the board among companies seeking to engender efficiencies. However, when they use AI to generate code, the volume of code is high but it can be very inefficient code. So the testing becomes a prime concern.
What we don’t have at the moment, and this is something we’re working on, is an answer to that. We have some ideas, though it’s a little too early to tell you what exactly it is. Sufficient to say that that is an important area of focus I want to take a measured and careful approach to incrementally get better at what we’re doing, but also place some significant bets in some of these newer areas.
You mentioned accessibility testing. Will that be an increasingly important part of the offering?
I’ll tell you what our customers are telling us: in North America, Europe and APAC, they are telling us with a single voice that accessibility testing is important. The volume of information that is spewed out by some accessibility tools is far too detailed.
The question is: what we can really focus on that’s important? So that’s a missing piece. You will likely see us work on accessibility, not to reinvent the wheel, but to take some of the core of what exists today, and embellish it with the AI that we can bring to bear, so that we can make the consumption of the results faster and more efficient.
What kind of a year have you had in 2025? What kind of a year do you expect in 2026?
2025 has been a very good year. Everybody’s looking to see how to make things better with AI. We’re seeing continued traction with the customers we already have, and there is also a renewed sense of interest, because Applitools Autonomous promises to allow organizations to test their applications with natural language, just like you would generate code with prompts with an LLM.
The Autonomous product is still relatively new – it’s not as mature as some of the folks who’ve been doing this for 10, 12 years. But it’s pretty strong and it’s competing really well. And we’re going to continue to invest in it. Traditionally, we were seen as a visual AI tool. Autonomize gives us an opportunity to really extend our footprint. Next year is going to be a great year for us.
How much of your growth will be achieved through M&A or new strategic partnerships?
At Applitools we want to be in a core set of spaces in testing, and we want to build that ourselves where it makes sense. We and Thoma Bravo are also open to seeing what the synergies are to partner, white label or acquire and we’re already looking at a few targets, that absolutely has to be a part of the deal.
Are we now past the peak of the AI ‘hype cycle’?
To use a baseball analogy, I’d say we’re only in the first inning. As we’ve seen with other IT transformations – the web, mobility, cloud transformation – there’s a mad rush, everybody will want to spend all kinds of money, and it’s still early days. So it is with AI.
People are still trying to figure out what they can build themselves, and what they have to outsource to vendors like us. And so, yes, it’s early days. But I think the folks who are ultimately delivering value are the ones that are going to win. And so we are extremely mindful of how we’re using AI in our products, and how we are delivering value. I’d rather do that than just say we do AI and then see what sticks.
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