SmartBear expands its testing market reach with Zephyr acquisition

When a couple of long-established players are competing hard in any given market, one easy way to expand that market is to simply combine forces. That’s what SmartBear did today when it bought Zephyr, a fellow software testing firm with deep reach into the Atlassian Marketplace. Terms of the deal were not disclosed.

Zephyr gives SmartBear a tool that includes Zephyr for Jira. Jira is the popular issue tracking software from Atlassian favored by many developers. In fact, Zephyr is the top grossing app in the Atlassian Marketplace, boasting over 18,000 teams using the tool to execute over 40 million tests, according to information supplied by the company.

That kind of reach appealed to SmartBear CEO Justin Teague. The company claims the combined organizations will give them one of the most complete software testing product portfolios in the market. “The acquisition of Zephyr will establish SmartBear as a leader in test management and broaden our portfolio of high-impact, easy-to- use tools…,” he said in a statement.

For Zephyr, getting acquired gives them increased reach as a combined company that they simply couldn’t build on their own. “By leveraging the industry expertise and array of SmartBear solutions, our customers will continue to benefit from the tools they know and love, while now being able to solve additional software development challenges related to building, testing, and monitoring software applications across the UI and API layer,” Zephyr CEO Scott Johnson said in a statement. (In other words, their existing customers should have nothing to worry about after the transition.)

SmartBear launched in 2009 and was acquired by Francisco Partners, a private equity firm in May 2017. Leveraging additional players in a market to build more substantial marketshare is a typical private equity strategy after acquiring a company. It’s the two companies are better than one approach.

Zephyr launched in 2007 and has raised $31 million. Investors include Frontier Ventures, Cervin Ventures and WTI.