SmartBear BearQ wins 2026 CRN Tech Innovator award

SmartBear BearQ™, an agentic QA system, has won a 2026 CRN® Tech Innovator Award. CRN, a brand of The Channel Company, named BearQ a winner in the Application Development and DevOps category, calling it out among the most innovative technologies shaping the IT channel this year. 

AI has changed how fast software gets built, but for many organizations, testing hasn’t kept pace. Seventy percent of software experts say application quality is already suffering as AI speeds up code creation, while 68% worry that faster AI-driven development will only widen the testing bottleneck, according to a recent SmartBear study, Closing the AI Software Quality Gap. 

That imbalance affects the entire software delivery pipeline because it functions like an assembly line. Speed up code generation without speeding up testing, and the gains at any one stage lack real impact. Instead, the pressure just piles up downstream, on QA teams, turning what should be efficiency gains into headaches. BearQ was built to close that gap. 

Why CRN recognized BearQ

The CRN Tech Innovator Awards honor products that show real technological differentiation and value to the solution provider channel. CRN’s editorial team chose this year’s winners from hundreds of submissions across 30 technology categories. BearQ was selected for its innovation, market differentiation, and measurable value for partners and customers. 

“The 2026 CRN Tech Innovator Awards winners represent the most innovative technologies driving the future of the IT channel,” said Jennifer Follett, vice president, U.S. content and executive editor at CRN, The Channel Company. “These award-winning solutions demonstrate exceptional vision, technological ingenuity, and a commitment to solving real-world challenges for partners and customers.” 

BearQ’s agentic approach to QA

BearQ is an agentic QA system that autonomously explores, tests, and validates applications as they exist today, not against outdated scripts or specs. Its always-on QA agents, including the QA Lead Agent, Explorer Agent, and Tester Agent, map how an application actually behaves, generate and maintain tests, and validate real user journeys as the product evolves. 

That’s a meaningful evolution from how most teams test today. Scripted automation tools only validate what engineers explicitly define, and they break the moment a UI or workflow shifts underneath them. BearQ starts from a different premise. It learns the application directly, discovers user journeys on its own, and keeps coverage current without someone rewriting scripts or updating specs every sprint. 

Teams decide what level of autonomy BearQ executes at. Configurable oversight lets QA and engineering leaders set where agents explore freely and where a human reviews before anything ships, so expanded coverage doesn’t come at the cost of control. 

Many product engineering and QA teams are under pressure to test more without adding headcount or more script maintenance work. BearQ’s combination of wider, adaptive coverage and configurable human oversight is what made the difference in earning this recognition. 

What’s new with BearQ

As software development evolves, so will BearQ. Since launching in March, BearQ has added: 

• Greater configurability: Additional configurable guardrails, exclusion rules, and functional area focus controls let teams define exactly what BearQ should explore and what it should leave alone. 

• Cost governance: Workspace-level agent compute unit (ACU) tracking, project and team consumption visibility, and overage alerts help teams stay ahead of usage before hitting limits. 

• Deeper ecosystem connectivity: New integrations span CI/CD, GitHub, Atlassian, Azure DevOps (ADO), and MCP-enabled workflows. 

• Bidirectional MCP support: BearQ can now participate in broader agent ecosystems, not just take instructions from them. 

• Richer reporting: Workflow-level issue details are now tracked alongside BearQ’s daily summaries and audit-ready reports. 

Start a free trial of BearQ and see what’s next. 

Application integrity, validated by the channel 

This win maps back to SmartBear’s mission of helping teams achieve application integrity, the continuous, measurable assurance that software works as intended, at speed and scale. For SmartBear’s channel partners, it’s further proof that BearQ gives them a way to help customers modernize QA and clear testing bottlenecks as AI reshapes how software gets built. 

BearQ is available now. Start a free trial today and see how autonomous QA agents close the gap between how fast your team ships and how confidently you can test it.