P101 leads €3.5 million investment round in Italian startup AppQuality

P101 leads €3.5 million investment round in Italian startup AppQuality

Published: 27-05-2020 09:30:00 | By: Pie Kamau | hits: 5389 | Tags:

Venture Capital P101 SGR , through its second vehicle P102 and ITA500 (venture capital fund set up by Azimut Sgr Free Enterprise and managed by P101), lead a  €3.5 million investment round in AppQuality, a leading Italian crowdtesting platform . The round was attended by Italian Angels for Growth (IAG), Investors Club and Club Italia Investimenti 2 , already in the company's capital together with Digital360 .

The funds raised will be used, among other things, to develop proprietary tools and technologies capable of making the services offered even faster, less expensive and more effective than traditional testing methods. For AppQuality the focus will continue to be on creating "Defect Detection" tools and services for optimizing the Customer Experience, creating a crowd of ever deeper skills and increasing the potential of collective intelligence thanks to increasingly effective collaboration tools, which have proved particularly useful in this emergency period dictated by Coronavirus. In addition, investments will increase to enhance international expansion on European markets.

Founded in 2015 at the Cremona Campus of the Milan Polytechnic , by Luca Manara (CEO), Edoardo Vannutelli and Filippo Renga (co-founder of the Digital Innovation Observatories), and grown up in PoliHub, certified incubator of the Polytechnic of Milan, the startup has created a solution that helps companies create "Bug Free" servicesand to optimize the User Experience of apps, websites, chatbots, Internet of Things devices, e-commerce, etc. through crowdtesting. Through this technique it is in fact possible to bring end users and bug seekers (bugs, that is, service defects) directly into the design, development and evolution of a digital product. The company today has a worldwide community of 14,000 qualified and certified testers .

AppQuality has grown at a rapid pace in recent years, tripling turnover and staff from 2017 to today, expanding the market and product portfolio, creating partnerships with qualified professionals, until arriving in 2018 to be the industry leader in the Italian marketand to take its first steps in the international market. AppQuality counts more than 100 corporate companies of the caliber of Pirelli, BMW, Bending Spoons, Unicredit, Moncler, Allianz, Enel, Vodafone, Dyson , etc. among its customers .

For P101, the transaction represents a strategic entry into the crowdtesting sector , which has continued to grow in Europe in recent years. According to a McKinsey research, services with a high quality of User Experience generate an improvement in performance up to 2 times higher in terms of turnovercompared to those who do not invest in this area. In particular, crowdtesting allows to eliminate defects even before a digital product is launched on the market. This result is critically important because, according to a study by Cambridge University, software debugging costs companies 50% of their developers' time each year, amounting to $312 billion annually.

The new Board of Directors will be composed not only by the founders but also by Giuseppe Donvito, partner of P101, and Gianluca D'Agostino, IAG member.

Giuseppe Donvito, Partner at P101 said: ''We are very proud to be able to accompany the international growth and expansion of an innovative and disruptive company such as AppQuality. Today the User Experience guides the digital economy: companies compete on the innovation front in terms of UX and the quality in the development of digital products becomes a critical success factor. AppQuality and its quality team fit right into this development which will be increasingly central in the years to come.''

Luca Manara, founder and CEO AppQuality said: ''The entry of P101, through the fund P102 and ITA500, will allow us to invest in the technology of our platform (Platform as a Service) and therefore to offer companies quantitative and qualitative tools that allow them to develop the best apps and digital solutions. This will further increase the high quality and level of service that we guarantee to our customers. Thanks to this investment it will be possible to develop and attract additional talents for the creation and marketing of new product lines, all based on crowd-sourcing technology.''

www.app-quality.com

www.p101.it