Building Better Software: Our Investment in Cypress

As developers have embraced faster, more frequent releases and users expect seamless digital experiences, software applications face a higher-than-ever bar for reliability and performance. Testing often and early in the development life cycle has become vital. However, modern software development lacks a modern testing solution – existing automated testing tools are notoriously unreliable and manual testing is costly and not scalable. As a result, organizations write fewer tests or avoid writing them altogether, adversely impacting application quality.

Cypress’ Solution

Cypress enables developers to devise tests for their browser-based applications that are easier to write, simpler to debug, and more reliable than existing tools. Powering this is a technical innovation – Cypress’ novel framework runs tests directly in the browser and allows developers to visualize the state of their application while it is being tested. Using Cypress, customers can dramatically improve test coverage, reduce bugs that appear in production, and rapidly diagnose and fix errors. Teams at companies like Netflix, Autodesk, Shopify, Conde Nast, Johnson & Johnson, and Disney are using Cypress to recast their entire development process. At GoDaddy, which serves 18 million customers globally, Cypress has doubled new feature test coverage and decreased test maintenance costs by 75%, greatly improving developer productivity.

While Cypress only began commercializing in late 2018, it is already an open-source success and one of the fastest-growing projects on GitHub. Over 80,000 developers have written millions of Cypress tests and the project has over 500 monthly unique contributors, nearly 5x as many as its primary competitor. As usage proliferates within an organization, Cypress’ visualization and test parallelization features become essential for teams and enterprises to test at scale and drive paid conversion. Cypress has become an irreplaceable component of the development cycle at several Fortune 500 companies across industries, despite no outbound sales and marketing efforts.

Stripes Invests in Cypress’ $40M Series B Financing

Since first meeting CEO Drew Lanham in April 2019, we have been consistently impressed by Cypress’ universal developer affinity. We are excited to invest in Cypress because we believe its unwavering focus on building the best product will continue to drive adoption across organizations of all sizes and levels of engineering sophistication. We spoke with over 20 customers and users and were struck by the genuine love for a product in a category that has historically engendered frustration, not excitement.

We were instantly captivated by Brian Mann, the founder and creator of Cypress, and his intuition for understanding developers needs coupled with his relentless drive to build products to support them. We share his ambitious vision that Cypress can continue building on its edge in end-to-end application software testing and become the leading platform for all forms of developer-first testing. We believe Cypress can not only automate what remains a predominantly manual industry today, but also grow the market by giving even the least experienced developers the ability to check, and the confidence to know with certainty, that their code works as intended.

As with our investment in Snyk, we are firm believers in products that equip developers to build higher quality, more performant software without compromising development speed. We feel testing is an integral but highly under-optimized area of software development that Cypress will revolutionize, delivering tremendous downstream benefits to customers.

We are thrilled to welcome Cypress to the Stripes family and empower developers to build better software faster for their customers.