FPE Capital leads growth investment into Global App Testing, a global testing platform to the software development sector

FPE Capital LLP (‘FPE’), the software & services focused lower mid-market growth investor, announces that it has led a growth investment into Global App Testing, a global web and app testing platform to the software development community.

This marks the third investment from FPE Fund III, the successful final close of which was announced in May at a raised hard cap of £185m.

The investment from FPE will back the founders Ronald Cummings-John and Owais Peer and their management team as they accelerate the Company’s existing strong growth on the back of earlier stage investment.

Global App Testing was founded in 2013 and combines a proprietary autonomous testing platform with an intelligent crowd testing network to deliver fast, accurate bug testing to QA and Development teams at hundreds of leading brands including Google, Microsoft, General Electric and Booking.com. These customers now rely on Global App Testing’s impact-first approach to quality, allowing Agile and DevOps teams to release faster and more often. The business operates in a large and growing market for software crowd testing, estimated to be $1.3bn globally and forecast to grow at 17% p.a. to 2026. This market growth is underpinned by a raft of favourable drivers and these tailwinds have seen the company achieve 50% growth in ARR in recent years.

FPE Capital has a successful track record in backing software businesses with a focus on market leading, quality products and strong, client focused, cultures. With FPE’s support, the business is now planning to invest further into product development and autonomous testing, and to scale the business further in the US market.
Alongside FPE’s investment, Santander has provided debt facilities to finance the transaction.

“We could immediately see the value that Ronald and Owais had built and we developed a very positive chemistry with them as we discussed with them the next steps in supporting their continued growth. We are excited to be working with them on the next part of this journey”. Llewellyn John, Partner at FPE

“FPE is delighted to have completed this investment into Global App Testing, our third in Fund III following the investments into Egress and Dynamic Planner. Our investment focus is on assisting high quality businesses scale successfully, and there are really exciting opportunities for the business in a large market where the return on investment for customers is very high.” David Barbour, Managing Partner at FPE

“We identified that FPE was the right partner not just on its track record of backing software companies and expertise in the next stage of growth that we are targeting, but also in helping us with key initiatives such as moving further into the US market.“ Ronald Cummings-John, Co-Founder at Global App Testing

“This is great news for the whole Global App Testing team. I would like to also thank our earlier investors who helped us get to this stage, all of whom will be reinvesting alongside FPE for the next stage of growth”. Owais Peer, Co-Founder at Global App Testing

 

The FPE investment was led by Henry Sallitt, Llewellyn John, Chris Kay and Claire Sweet. FPE was advised on the transaction by Stephenson Harwood (Legal), Fairgrove Partners (Commercial), Intechnica (IT Diligence), RSM (Financial), Continuum (Management) and FRP (Debt advisory).

Santander provided debt facilities to the Company as part of the investment.

The shareholders of Global App Testing were advised by AGC Partners (Financial), Grant Thornton (Tax), and Osborne Clarke and Ashfords (Legals).