Investment firm Insight Partners is considering selling software quality engineering firm Tricentis in a deal that could be valued at up to $4 billion, according to various reports.
Insight Partners has reportedly instructed Evercore to source for potential candidates to take over Tricentis, generally considered as one of the biggest players in AI-powered automated software testing.
Analysts have said the firm, which has around 2,500 clients worldwide, including a range of banks and financial services firms, could change hands for close to $4 billion. The firm has revenues of around $430 million and close to $86 million in EBITDA.
When approached by QA Financial, no one at Insight Partners was available to comment. Evercore declined to discuss the potential sale.
SeaLights
The news of a potential sale comes only two months after the firm bought SeaLights, a SaaS-based, software quality intelligence platform.
The latest acquisition added to a hyperactive year for the Texas-based QA multinational, with various product launches, multiple acquisitions and a recent strategic partnership in 2024 alone.
At the same time, under CEO Kevin Thompson, the company has set out ambitious plans to push further into the US market.
SeaLights, which was founded in 2015, provides a host of large banks, financial services firms and insurance players with metrics, traceability, tests and insights meet quality gates and deliver software.
The firm uses agents to map code to tests and evaluate code that has changed, turning to machine learning (ML) to identify quality risks during software releases.
This shift-left capability enables software development teams to focus on the minimum number of functional tests, thereby saving time and speeding up their release delivery.
This was one of the main reasons why SeaLights stands out and got the attention from Tricentis CEO Thompson.
He explained that “the additional capabilities of SeaLights further extend the dominance of our comprehensive quality intelligence solutions to a wide array of applications and environments.”
“In today’s complex, fast-moving IT environments, AI-powered quality intelligence is an absolute game changer.”
– CEO Kevin Thompson
Thomspon claimed his firm can now provide customers with AI-enabled quality intelligence beyond SAP environments and into both custom and packaged applications.
This includes test impact analysis, quality risk management, root cause analysis, and support across all programming languages.
The deal is Tricentis’ second acquisition in the past twelve months, following the purchase of Waldo in July 2023. Financial details of the transaction have not been disclosed but the takeover is valued at around $150 million.
Founded by Franz Fuchsberger and Wolfgang Platz in 2007 in Vienna, Tricentis serves around 3,000 customers in 19 countries, including more than half of the Fortune 500.
New platforms
The acquisition comes barely six weeks after Tricentis bought a new platform to the market, designed to help financial services firms to increase their productivity and improve application quality.
The launch of yet another testing tool and today’s acquisition mean the US-based company continues to penetrate the QA space with new solutions, thereby working to “remove the need to switch between tools and offer full testing context,” as a senior Tricentis executive told QA Financial recently.
The latest solution, called Tricentis Copilot, should be seen as a generative AI assistant that helps QA teams to find, understand, and optimize test assets through an intuitive chat interface, Mav Turner, chief product and strategy officer at Tricentis, told this publication in an email.
“This ensures greater efficiency, faster onboarding, and reduced redundancy,” claimed Turner, since January of this year the company’s chief product and strategy officer, based in Austin, Texas.
Moreover, the platform enables users to quickly understand long, complex workflows by summarizing end-to-end tests in simple, natural language.
“This functionality boosts productivity, simplifies maintenance, and accelerates onboarding for new team members,” Turner noted.
Busy year
It has been a busy year so far for Tricentis. The company provides software testing automation and software quality assurance products, serving dozens of banks around the world.
The latest launch comes only weeks after the firm launched a new AI-powered tool that it claims can measure software speed and quality more efficiently and accurately.
The Copilot platform is supported by GenAI applications and helps quality engineering teams and developers integrate AI responsibly by testing complex applications, Turner said.
“This is a suite of solutions leveraging generative AI to enhance productivity throughout the entire testing lifecycle,” Turner shared with this publication.
“In other words, Copilot makes it quicker and easier for users to create tests using generative AI,” he said.
SAP Test automation
Meanwhile, in March, brought a new SAP Test Automation platform to the market, a SaaS-based test automation capability designed to help banks, financial services firms and other large entities that use SAP solutions to manage end-to-end transformation initiatives and need to store or process large amounts of personal or sensitive data.
The solution integrates with SAP applications and technologies and further extends the existing test automation functionality included within SAP Cloud ALM.
Key features of the tool include a model-based, codeless, and AI-driven automation to promote ease of use, as well as comprehensive testing capabilities across SAP and third-party software systems.
It also enables a scalable test execution across distributed infrastructures and advanced API testing capabilities, including simulation features, the firm claimed.
The latest launches and this week’s takeover come only months after Tricentis added a virtual mobile grid service to its portfolio to make it simpler to test mobile applications at scale. A range of banks use the tool for their mobile banking apps.
The service is based on the platform Tricentis gained following its acquisition of testing firm Waldo and was integrated within the Tricentis Mobile application testing framework.
North American market
In a further sign the US is firmly on the company’s expansion plan’s radar, Tricentis recruited Damien Johnson recently as its new field chief technology officer (CTO) for the American markets.
New York City-based Johnson is a well-known name within the testing space, considered a seasoned QA professional with a career spanning close to three decades in SAP transformations.
He was previously global chief architect for RISE with German software multinational SAP where he was responsible for helping company’s large strategic customers and major service providers modernise and migrate to the cloud.
At Tricentis, Johnson will help support the company’s technology and business strategy with a focus on providing technical expertise and guidance to customers, prospects, and partners to achieve maximal value through their IT transformation and DevOps initiatives, the firm shared with QA Financial.
Zuci partnership
As part of its efforts to push further into the US market, Tricentis told QA Financial at the end of last month it was teaming up with digital consulting and artificial intelligence solution provider Zuci, based in Dallas, Texas.
The partnership is primarily aimed at accelerating test cycles and streamlining software delivery processes to increase operational efficiency.
In addition, Chaim Frenkel, VP of strategic alliances at Tricentis, disclosed that the collaboration means his company will start to integrate Tricentis’ AI-driven automation technologies into Zuci’s product offering.
“Basically, we will combine the strength of our quality assurance solutions with their leading consulting and advisory services,” Frenkel explained.
“It is beyond critical for customers of all sizes to partner with a strategic consulting advisor to steward the digital transformation journey, promote best practices, and enable ongoing success across an ever-changing E2E technology landscape,” he noted.
The partnership will expand Zuci’s intelligent testing capabilities, utilising AI-driven insights, as well as boost test automation maturity and realise a range of DevOps objectives.
“It’s all about doing things better and faster, reducing risks, and getting our solutions to market pronto,” stressed Sujatha Sugumaran, director of quality engineering at Zuci.
The Indian-American firm was only launched in 2016 and is active in North America, Europe and India, employing around 500 ‘zengineers’, as Zuci calls all of its employees.
Explaining why her company, dubbed by some as the ‘new kid on the AI block’, entered this new partnership, Sugumaran said “this move is right in line with our clients’ objectives, as well as those of global enterprises and software vendors striving to stay competitive. Teaming up with Tricentis gives us an edge in the US.”
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