The pitch to hire people was awkward. You would be joining a company that, in its early years, worked out of a Starbucks. That, by one account of BrowserStack's early days, was the sort of thing that made good candidates pause.
Ritesh Arora and Nakul Aggarwal had met at IIT Bombay, studying Computer Science, and the two were by many accounts roommates. Before BrowserStack they had already tried other ventures, and those failures made them wary of outside money. They ran a small consulting business and were fans of Ruby on Rails, writing a popular blog and contributing to open source.
Ritesh Arora and Nakul Aggarwal had met at IIT Bombay, studying Computer Science, and the two were by many accounts roommates.
The real itch came from something dull. They were building a website for the consulting business. Nakul built it quickly. Testing it was the nightmare: old versions of Internet Explorer, slow connections, device after device. Setting up a lab to check every browser would have taken days. So the two sat in a Mumbai coffee shop and asked if anyone else suffered. They found over a hundred developers complaining about exactly this on Twitter, Stack Overflow and Reddit.
They built a tool, opened a free beta in 2011, and within a month about 10,000 people had used it. Developers talked about it publicly, jQuery's founder among them. Nobody was spending on marketing; the company reportedly spent no marketing money in its first eight years.
Then came the quieter decision. Rather than hunt for investors, they charged $19 a month on a pay-as-you-go plan. It meant they were profitable almost from the start, and revenue reportedly reached about $20,000 a month within six months. Pricing got messy later, with 15 plans, so they cut it to three.
It was not smooth. The browser world moved from Internet Explorer to Chrome. Mobile app testing took close to three years to build, against a few months for the web version. In 2024 a rival, Deque Systems, sued over its accessibility products; a US federal court dismissed the complaint in January 2025.
Only in 2018 did they take outside money, a $50M Series A from Accel, followed in 2021 by a $200M round at a $4 billion valuation. By 2025 the company reported about $225 million in revenue. In April 2025 the founders pledged Rs 100 crore to IIT Bombay.
For a first-time founder the lesson is unglamorous. They did not invent a grand category. They fixed an irritation they personally felt, checked that strangers felt it too, and charged for it on day one.