SmartBear Completes Investment Transaction with Vista Equity Partners and Francisco Partners
Investment will broaden and strengthen the company’s portfolio of industry-leading commercial and open source solutions
Somerville - March 4, 2021 - SmartBear, a leading provider of software development and quality tools, announced today that Vista Equity Partners (“Vista”), a leading global investment firm focused on enterprise software, data, and technology-enabled businesses, has successfully closed their investment in the company, originally announced in October 2020.
With its investment, Vista joins Francisco Partners, a leading global technology-focused investment firm, which acquired SmartBear in 2017. Together, Vista and Francisco Partners will partner with the SmartBear management team to accelerate growth, promote innovation, and expand the business in support of the rapidly growing DevOps market.
SmartBear solutions include modern technologies around API lifecycle management, test automation, test management, performance optimization, and collaboration. These solutions are used by leading organizations to enable the design, development, and release of higher-quality software at scale.
“We are excited to use this investment to advance our positive impact on software development teams everywhere, who are migrating to quality-driven DevOps to increase their competitive market positioning through reduced costs and quicker time to market,” said Frank Roe, CEO of SmartBear. “We completed 2020 with another record year of growth and are thrilled with the support and partnership we now have from Vista and Francisco Partners to broaden and strengthen our product offerings and also identify continued organic and inorganic growth opportunities.”
About SmartBear
SmartBear delivers application integrity for modern tech stacks, ensuring continuous, measurable assurance that software just works as intended – with governance to operate at AI speed and scale. SmartBear offers deep test automation, API lifecycle management, and observability capabilities. With integrations across the SDLC, it sets a new quality standard for application delivery teams.
SmartBear is trusted by developers, testers, and software engineers across 32,000 organizations, including 75% of the largest financial institutions and industry leaders such as Adobe, JetBlue, and Microsoft. SmartBear’s open source tools are downloaded more than 100 million times a month and have earned over 30,000 GitHub stars from the developer community. With its best-loved brands, including Swagger, TestComplete, Reflect, QMetry, Zephyr, and more, SmartBear meets customers where they are to make our technology-driven world a better place. Learn more at www.smartbear.com, or follow us on LinkedIn, X, and Reddit.
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