Our investment in Cypress.io
Spend more time coding, less time testing
Bob Goodman & Mike Droesch
Published on Jun 28, 2018
We are excited to announce our recent investment in Cypress.io. Cypress has built a next-gen front-end test automation product for modern web applications. Cypress’ open source test runner is quickly gaining adoption among developers as a replacement for the widely used Selenium toolkit. We are proud to be partnering with CEO Drew Lanham, Founder and CTO Brian Mann, and the rest of the Cypress team as they continue on their mission to empower developers to spend more time building great apps and less time worrying about testing.
At Bessemer, we have long been fans of developer-centric businesses, and we have published many of our thoughts on the space, including our eight laws of developer platforms. Cypress is a rare business that checks all eight boxes, and excels across many dimensions. This all starts with a product that delivers a delightful and intuitive user experience, runs tests dramatically faster than incumbent products, and is more reliable than any other test automation framework.
Our decision to invest was driven largely by two main factors: first, the strength and passion of the team, and second, the outrageous developer love for Cypress’ product.
The first factor was immediately clear upon meeting Drew and Brian and hearing the story.
The second factor took a little more digging to confirm, but pretty quickly after speaking with users and taking a look Cypress’ Twitter feed, we were convinced.
In our minds, one of the most important pieces of a great developer platform business is outright, emphatic “developer love.” After all, the developer community is extremely well-informed about what tools they need and they are generally averse to being sold to in the traditional sense. Therefore the only way to build a successful developer platform business is to start with a product that genuinely makes developers’ lives easier and provides a dramatic improvement over the status quo solution. The flip side is that once you clear this high bar, developers are very good about praising the tools they love and sharing their reviews publicly.
Just take a look at following tweets about Cypress, and you will see what we mean:
Building a successful developer platform business also requires the company to be actively engaged in fostering a thriving community, and over the past few years, Cypress has done just that. Today, Cypress has grown the community to tens of thousands of users with over 100 million recorded tests. They have done so by listening closely to their users’ needs and delivering features that truly delight them. We are extremely excited to work with this team and help them continue to build out more great tools that will enable developers to easily run more frequent tests as they code, and waste less time debugging broken apps.
We are proud to welcome Cypress to the Bessemer portfolio, and encourage anyone building modern web applications to check them out.
Contributors
Bob Goodman
Partner
Bob Goodman is a partner in the New York office where he has been a leading investor in enterprise software, mobile, and B2B marketplace companies for over 20 years. In that time he has helped over 15 companies reach successful M&A and IPO exits, including BladeLogic (IPO in 2007), Broadsoft (IPO in 2010), Intucell (acquired by Cisco) and Flarion Technologies (acquired by Qualcomm).
Bob currently sits on many boards, including ACV Auctions, Sisense, and many other startups. Bob is there for the highs and lows of building great companies. He is passionate about partnering with early-stage founders and being one of the first investors they call.
Before becoming an investor, he founded two successful telecommunications companies. While building his second company, Celcore, Bob raised his Series A from Bessemer in 1994. After Celcore was acquired by Alcatel through the acquisition of DSC in 1997, Bob decided to join the firm as the first partner in New York City. Prior to Celcore Bob founded Boatphone, a group of cellular operating companies in the Caribbean. Having served as CEO of both companies, Bob offers a dynamic combination of entrepreneurial, operating, and investment expertise to his portfolio companies. He holds a B.A. from Brown University and an M.B.A. from Columbia University.
Mike Droesch
Partner
Mike Droesch is a partner in the Boston office primarily focusing on AI applications, cybersecurity, supply chain software, and B2B marketplaces. He currently serves on the board of directors for Tackle, Curri, Raft, Cypress, Netography, Optimal Dynamics, and VendorPM.
Previously, Mike worked with a few venture-backed startups in Boston, including two Bessemer portfolio companies, Fuze and InsightSquared, where he supported sales operations and analytics efforts. He started his career as a systems engineer and then spent nearly three years in management consulting at Navigant, where he helped companies build new businesses around emerging energy and infrastructure technologies in the U.S. and Middle East.
He holds an MBA from the MIT Sloan School of Management, a Master’s Degree in naval architecture and engineering from the University of Michigan, and a degree in mechanical engineering from Tufts University.
