Insight Partners has a rich history of investing in developer testing tools. We’re proud to have supported companies like SmartBear, Tricentis/QASymphony, Browserstack,Waldo, and others which help their customers accelerate release cycles and deliver better, more stable end products.

An emergent technique within testing we have closely monitored is integration testing — the testing of interdependent code and resources to ensure components operate as expected. As developers shift toward microservices, testing the interconnection of application components is becoming ubiquitous and an integral part of the development process.

Testcontainers has widely become the leading open-source software for integration tests, with ~7 million monthly Docker downloads and a vibrant and passionate developer community. The community’s growth is accelerating. Using Testcontainers, developers can spin up testing environments for common integration and UI tests using Docker containers, which act as “throwaway” instances for production-like replicas of external resources (e.g., databases, web browsers, other microservices). This enables faster creation and execution of integration tests and mitigates many painful issues for developers that come from spinning up and taking down tests manually.

There are lots of obstacles to using integration testing, particularly for more complex software. Keeping local testing environments up-to-date with new code releases is cumbersome. Running integration tests is taxing on local developer machines. Replicating tests from one machine to another is not as simple as it seems. Many developers we’ve spoken to have had some form of the “works only on my machine” problem where a test is successful on their laptop but not a teammate’s!

The Testcontainers’ founders set out to build a cloud-hosted, commercial version — driven by the simple belief that running Testcontainers in the cloud would provide clear improvements to development velocity and better enterprise deployments.

For this they are now launching Testcontainers Cloud (TCC). Through this new product, developers can seamlessly route integration tests to cloud servers and fine-tune their test environments to production-grade specifications, resolving the “works on my machine” problem. By sending tests to the cloud, developers also free up local compute resources and enable tests to run up to 3x faster. Developers do not even need Docker installed on their machine and can now take advantage of Cloud IDEs and other live collaboration tools.

With the launch of Testcontainers Cloud to public beta, AtomicJar offers a full suite of integration testing products. AtomicJar streamlines integration testing for software projects, regardless of scope or complexity.

Before making our investment, we conducted extensive diligence that included surveying hundreds of developers, talking to many of AtomicJar’s beta customers, and deeply understanding the product and its roadmap and were amazed by the size of the opportunity that will continue to grow as microservices continue to get adopted by companies of all sizes. We are thrilled about AtomicJar’s potential to improve the productivity of the almost 90M software developers across a wide range of industries, geographies, and software development methodologies. We’re excited to partner with them as they help lead the “shift left” of best-in-class software testing and delivery.

Originally published at https://www.insightpartners.com on February 1, 2023.

This year will mark 40 years since Adobe was founded. In the decades since, Adobe has been the most influential shaper of internet and graphical design through pivotal transitions in their journey and how software is delivered broadly: from early origins in creating underlying programming languages and file formats like PostScript and .PDF to many evolutions of Flash and their continued expansion of the Creative Suite offering. With over 25 million subscribers and a market cap north of $170B, Adobe represents the scale at which design tools are being adopted horizontally.

As the language of business communication continues to become more visual, a number of new persona and purpose-built design tools have emerged in recent years. Some notable examples are Figma, which is bringing real-time collaboration to graphic UI designers, Canva, which is democratizing photo-editing for non-technical designers and creators, PlayPlay, which allows marketing teams and other business users to quickly create and edit videos, and platforms like Miro and Mural, which build workflows and tools around digital whiteboarding.

With all of these new tools, it’s never been a better time to be a designer or start becoming one. Unlike the prior generation of on-prem, license-maintenance design software, modern design tools were built to be used in the browser on a freemium basis — far more approachable and inviting for non-designers like myself to begin playing around with. Still, while the emergence of the modern design stack has significantly lowered the barrier to communicating complex or novel concepts visually, when it comes to easy-to-use illustration tools that are powerful and equipped with the proper guardrails required to keep less experienced designers from creating something off brand or disproportionate, there’s not a lot of options in the marketplace.

This is where designstripe comes in. With designstripe, non-designers and designers alike can create beautiful and impactful illustrations without accidentally straying from their brand colors or core design principles (e.g. proportion, pattern, contrast). Users can either start from scratch or choose from a large library of pre-existing design assets which they can search and customize by granular context.

The power of designstripe lies within its simple but well executed approach of combining easy-to-use tools with fully-owned, customizable illustrations. Like many of the breakout design tools aforementioned, designstripe invested heavily in their underlying platform and asset library from Day 1. Originally, designstripe operated as a full stack design studio that created unique and customizable vector illustrations. As their library of assets grew, the designstripe team began developing internal tools to streamline the creation process as well as their own data labelling engine to ensure every object, blueprint, color palette and pattern could be searched and edited granularly. Long term, designstripe aims to apply expand beyond illustrations in allowing their users to easily create animations, presentations, motion designs and more.

We are thrilled to be partnering with Francois and the entire designstripe team in their journey and welcoming them as the latest in a long history of design investments here at Insight — Shutterstock, Frame, Mural, nTopology, SimScale, Lightricks, PlayPlay and more. In designstripe, we see the same potential to become the leading design platform for creating beautiful and impactful designs come to life, with speed and ease.

Originally published at https://www.insightpartners.com on June 23, 2022.

You don’t need to be a developer or devOps investor to know that software developers like to spend time creating, not maintaining apps and systems. While the cloud world has been an incredibly powerful enabler for software developers to build and automate workloads not previously possible in a faster and more exhaustive way, most software fanatics only see this side of the story. What people often forget is that every innovation, whether mega or step function, comes at a cost — it’s rarely free or without burden. As the enterprise continues its march toward a multi-cloud, hybrid and distributed world we can’t forget to enable the maintainers — the people focused on keeping it all from crumbling into a million pieces.

Google first defined site reliability engineering in 2003. While their internal stack and engineering org was and still is unique, they were simply ahead of the curve in recognizing the need for defining reliability-focused engineers tasked with keeping increasingly complex cloud stacks from crashing and identifying automation gaps. In the case of the need for SREs (site reliability engineers), Google realized that while traditional software developers do spend a portion of their time on what they consider the less exciting exercises of debugging, building internal tools, and reviewing code, site reliability was nothing that could be handled by your typical software developer.

In the nearly 20 years since SRE became a defined role, site reliability engineering has become widely adopted across enterprises and cloud-first scale ups, with demand for SREs jobs exploding in parallel. However, while most of these enterprises have embraced automated devOps tools for building, testing, and deploying code, production ops remains largely manual. Aside from a handful of incident management and ticketing systems for detecting incidents and assigning them to the right person, SREs are managing ever-growing fleets and increasingly complex environments with VMs, containers, microservices, managed services, multiple clouds and accounts with the technological equivalent of bats and shovels.

Enter Shoreline: Modern Production Operations

Shoreline was born out of the pain of broken production operations which founder Anurag Gupta observed and experienced firsthand through launching and building AWS Database and Analytics to $5B+ ARR. When we first met Anurag in 2019, it was a few months after he’d left AWS to start Shoreline. He knew incident remediation in production cloud environments was monolithic and that SREs were the torch bearers — they were ones he had to empower to build the world of reliable infrastructure he envisioned. It was clear to us that there was a massive brain (with first mover network effects) attacking a colossal problem, and we were excited to follow the story.

It has been amazing to see the combination of deep enabling technology and product innovation that have lead to where Shoreline is today. Shoreline started ground up, spending over 2 years (!) developing their underlying SQL-like ops programming language for metricizing traditional observability logs and alerts into code that commands and complex executables can be run on. This is the underlying technology of Shoreline’s “remediations-as-code” platform — a centralized place for SREs to query and debug infrastructure as code and more importantly, a platform to create and deploy “set it and forget it” remediations that automatically detect and fix known incidents (e.g. bounce server, cluster management, data access control).

From speaking with some of Shoreline’s customers, it was very clear their solution was both unique and powerful. Not only were customers raving about the platform’s ability to automatically resolve common incidents in production, but also highlighted how Shoreline’s intuitive UI/UX allowed for broader team members to safely repair incidents in addition to faster live site debugging of new incidents When companies can’t hire enough SREs as is, the ROI of Shoreline is clear. Dataiku for example, one of Shoreline’s customers, estimated that Shoreline saved each engineer about 10 days of work per month.

As enterprise systems continue to revamp around their respective digital transformation journeys, we have little doubt SREs will become more critical than ever. Furthermore, it’s clear to us that the power of SREs is not in their ability to manually resolve incidents and respond to toil, but as the developers of self-healing reliable infrastructure; and we can’t think of a more important enabler of this than Shoreline.

Originally published at https://www.insightpartners.com on March 29, 2022.

Cyber security in theory should be simple — attack surface expands as software and cloud workloads complexify, new vulnerabilities and attack vectors form, and cybersecurity companies emerge to fill in the gaps. Unfortunately for CISOs and enterprise security teams, for every net new vulnerability, the number of attack vectors it creates tends to be tenfold. For CISOs, this has translated into a continuous cycle of buying and/or replacing security vendors, patching new vulnerabilities, and evaluating their security design. How we work is due for a shake-up; a deconstruction of followed by a powerful rebuild, and it’s hard to think of a better place to start than the center of virtually every modern workplace: the web browser.

In some ways, the evolution (or lack thereof) of the browser’s role in enterprise security has occurred exactly as you’d expect: ground zero for cloud-native solutions like SASE, CNAPP, and API security and gateway for existing security solutions to plug in their offering (e.g. CASB, DLP, and VDI).[1] Still, it’s hard not to wonder: Why hasn’t the browser progressed beyond it’s role as gatekeeper? Why don’t we think of it as a critical security layer the same way CISOs think about network, endpoint or even perimeter?

Restarting with Island

When we met Mike and Dan for the first time and heard their vision for building a Chromium-based browser with enterprise policies built in it sounded too good to be true. After hearing the how, why and why now, two things were clear: 1) the time was now and 2) if there ever were two Founders to execute on the size of the opportunity, they were Mike and Dan.

Their idea was elegantly simple: build an abstraction layer between Chromium — Google’s open-source browser project — and Island’s code, giving them the reigns on everything from proxy to last mile visibility & control of all browser based workloads.1,3 In doing so, Island allows security and IT teams to have unprecedented visibility and control of the browser, allowing them to orchestrate everything from basic data exfiltration protections within web-apps (e.g. copy/paste, download/upload, screenshot) to advanced security controls and governance (e.g. DLP, Zero Trust, PAM). Island’s tech can be installed directly on their customers’ existing browser, meaning there’s no need for additional installations.

We were lucky enough to lead the A round when Island was still operating in stealth as Zero Abstraction — code for their ability to abstract the browser from both the network and the device.

Doubling down

In less than 9 months since we initially invested, Island has gone from technology to horizontal category creator. With Island’s Enterprise Browser, CISOs can reimagine their security design across a growing number of enterprise use cases, including securing critical SaaS and internal web applications from data leakage, safe access for contractors and BYOD workers and full governance over privileged user accounts. It can also reduce virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) dependency while supporting built-in safe browsing, web filtering, web isolation, exploit prevention, smart network routing and Zero Trust access.

The Island team is just getting started, and we couldn’t be more excited to be along for the ride and double down.

Originally published at https://www.insightpartners.com on March 23, 2022.

The PC gaming world has a long history with mods, in-game apps, and other forms of UGC (User-Generated Content) that dates back to Castle Smurfenstein, a parody of the original Castle Wolfenstein game for the Apple II and Commodore 64 released in 1982. Fast forward to today and mods are responsible for some of the biggest commercial hits in gaming. For example Fortnite, which generated over an estimated $1B of revenue last year and was most recently valued at $28.7B, originated as a mod of Arma 2; Dota 2 (7.6M MAUs and >$1B lifetime revenue) and League of Legends (est. 2020 revenue of $1.75B) were originally launched from the popular Warcraft III mod, Defense of the Ancients, just to name a few.

While mods, in-game apps, and other forms of UGC have continued to develop in the 40 years since Castle Smurfenstein was released, UGC has only recently been streamlined in a way that enables creators to earn an income from their creations and developers to safely integrate mods in game. In this Behind the Investment, I’ll provide a brief overview on the history of UGC in gaming, why we think the time is now for the proliferation of UGC, and why we believe Overwolf is poised to power this new era of gaming.

What is a mod?

Gaming mods, at their core, are alterations of one or more aspects of a video game, from look and feel (e.g. characters, maps, gameplay rules) to complete overhauls (e.g. taking the technical foundation of a game and building an entirely new UI on top of it). For example, Dota 2 and League of Legends were both created via developers extracting their favorite native properties of Warcraft III (in both cases features centered around the game’s competitive multiplayer framework of hero levelling, experience points, and collecting items), and building new characters, storylines, and gameplay on top of them.

In addition to UGC in the form of mods, there’s also been a proliferation of socially connected ‘sandbox games’ built to thrive off of their user’s creating and sharing their own content. Insight invested in one of these early players back in 2005 with Jagex, the maker of Runescape. Runescape was one of the first massively successful free-to-play multiplayer RPGs (role-playing games) where players represented themselves with customizable avatars. Runescape did not have any linear storyline that players followed, but instead was built of users setting their own goals and objectives. In the years following Runescape’s success, other RPG games like Minecraft rose to popularity in the gaming community. Minecraft, which was first released in 2011 and eventually acquired by Microsoft in 2014 for $2.5B, is a virtual world where players could build their own structures with raw materials they ‘mined.’

Why in-game apps and mods have historically operated in a partisan way

In the pre-Overwolf days, building and using mods was a chaotic and unpredictable experience for both gamers and creators. For gamers, finding apps and mods to support or enhance their gaming experience meant searching for app-specific or one-off websites that were often limited in quality, scope, and had no guarantee they didn’t contain malware that would break their system or get them banned from a game. For creators developing apps and mods, their options were to either start from scratch or roll the dice with various open-source packages and hope they didn’t break or contain viruses; for those who got their creations to production, the act of building a user base and monetizing apps was even more difficult.

Overwolf and the UGC Economy

Enter Overwolf, the all-in-one platform that enables creators to build, distribute, and monetize in-game apps and mods as well as a marketplace for gamers to find, vet, and download content that enhances gameplay. For creators, Overwolf’s robust development engine provides features like real-time telemetry, software patching, in-game overlays, analytics, and publishing tools. Not only does Overwolf’s framework rapidly decrease creators’ time to production with their off the shelf components, plugins, and checklists, they also ensure optimal performance and compatibility with the games they’re built to supplement with real-time telemetry and testing frameworks. In addition, Overwolf handles the distribution and monetization of apps once they’re ready for production, which they release to their marketplace of over 18M monthly active gamers. In 2020, Overwolf paid out $10M to creators. For aspiring creators with big ideas, Overwolf even has a $7M investment fund they use to empower in-game creators to build their dream apps on the Overwolf platform.

Overwolf also recently launched CurseForge Core, a ‘UGC-as-a-service’ platform that provides an SDK for game developers that integrates into games themselves and functions as a gateway for users to discover and install mods in-game, across all platforms and storefronts. Overwolf believes in a future in which the gamer community can participate with the game developers to create new, moderated, and safe game experiences that will accelerate the community-created content movement.

In a world where games are increasingly free to play, we believe UGC is only going to continue to become more central to the entire gaming ecosystem of creators, players, and developers alike. With UGC everyone wins: gamers get in-game apps and mods that support their gameplay; the creators of these in-game apps and mods can get recognition or earn a sustainable income from their creations; and game developers level up their games by outsourcing content creation to talented and passionate gamers, maximizing shelf life and engagement. By bringing gamers, creators, and developers together, Overwolf is poised to benefit from network effects that will only get stronger with scale. As game developers increasingly come around to embracing UGC as both a direct revenue stream and reinforcer of their user’s engagement and retention, we believe Overwolf is powering an entirely new economy in gaming that’s just getting started.

Originally published at https://www.insightpartners.com on May 12, 2021.