UI-licious raises US$1.5mil pre-series A to scale UI test automation solution led by Monk’s Hill Ventures

• 90% teams still test applications with in-house testing or outsourced testers
• Proprietary smart targeting engine, ensuring it works on any browser, device

UI-licious, a first-of-its-kind UI test automation solution, announced today a new round of Pre-Series A funding of US$1.5million (RM6.2 million) led by Monk’s Hill Ventures. The funding will be used to expand its product development, and sales and marketing teams to expand its customer base of small to large enterprises.

Shi Ling Tai, CEO and cofounder of UI-licious said, “Currently, 90% of software teams worldwide rely on manual testing which is laborious, intensive, and costly. We created UI-licious because the software industry needs a UI test automation solution that is robust, scalable, and cost-effective - while being as simple as possible. It does not require technical expertise or additional manpower. We believe that automating tests for software will be the norm and standard practice rather than an exception.”

The platform focuses on:

- Ease to learn: Instead of the need to undergo years of training as a programmer to write

test scripts, UI-licious allows anyone to write tests in pseudo-English.

- Low maintenance: UI-licious tests are very robust and work even if the UI design and

underlying code change. The team developed a proprietary test engine that uses dynamic

code analysis to understand the structure of the application and determine which parts of the page are the intended target.

- Increases efficiency: UI-licious can reduce the time it takes for software teams to set up

their testing grid, write first test scripts, and set up continuous test monitoring from weeks to less than an hour.

- Better communication: Instead of writing a verbose bug report, testers can send UI-licious interactive test reports to show exactly how, where, and when the defect is in the application, allowing teams to resolve issues quickly.

Justin Nguyen, Partner at Monk’s Hill Ventures, said, “cofounders Shi Ling and Eugene have developed a product to address the quality assurance issues that have plagued the software automation industry for years. They have shown maturity, growth, and tenacity in pursuing their mission - to rid the world of software bugs. The team’s experience as software engineers has equipped them with the technical knowledge and insights to build a simple and robust tool that empowers manual testers to automate testing and detect bugs before users do. We look forward to working with them as they continue to scale and expand into international markets, delivering good user experiences globally.”

UI-licious currently serves customers around the world from small to large enterprises. This includes Daimler and Jones Lang LaSalle, who use the solution to deliver high-quality digital e-commerce experiences for their customer-facing applications and backend systems built on SAP, Microsoft Dynamics, and Salesforce. Glints, a tech-enabled recruitment firm, uses UI-licious to test their products before going out to market.

“UI-licious is a breath of fresh air compared to other existing platforms in the market. What we like is the ability to write tests collaboratively in (almost) plain English on an easy-to-use interface, which allows stakeholders to come together and understand the acceptance criteria. Using UI-licious, we were able to cut our manual QA run work by 80% and eliminate QA bottlenecks in our development cycle,” said Seah Ying Cong, CTO of Glints, a tech-enabled recruitment firm.

Proprietary smart targeting test engine

UI-licious has a smart targeting test engine that allows anyone to automate UI testing without needing to know how to code, and reduces the need to maintain the tests everytime the UI is changed.

The smart test engine dynamically analyzes the web application’s code to understand the structure of the user interface and intelligently determine what object to test based on the script. UI-licious also has a “show, not tell” feature that provides rich test reports to developers and business stakeholders on exactly how, when, and where a bug is happening in the application.

Self-service management tool – UI-licious also has a self-service management tool for testers to manage their test execution schedules and notifications. With UI-licious, testers can schedule a job to automatically run tests at regular intervals, and send notifications to the team on any.