Press Coverage

XML Code Testing Co. SOASTA Raises $2.25M Series A

By Jonathan Shieber
4/28/2006

Mountain View, Calif. -- SOASTA Inc., a new company developing automated code-testing tools for Web services programming, has raised $2.25 million in its first round of funding.

Financing for the pre-revenue, pre-product start-up was led by Canaan Partners with a $1.5 million investment. The company's founders and additional individual investors also contributed to the round. As a result of Canaan's investment, John Balen, a general partner with the firm, will take a seat on the SOASTA board.

"What we are doing is building a brand new set of tools to automate the testing of Web applications," said Ken Gardner, the 55-year-old serial entrepreneur who co-founded SOASTA and serves as the company's chairman and chief executive officer.

The three-month-old SOASTA is Gardner's sixth start-up. He most recently founded and served as the CEO of Istante Software Inc. prior to its acquisition by PeopleSoft Inc. Mountain View, Calif.-based Istante, formerly called Iteration Software Inc., was also backed by Canaan Partners.

SOASTA, which intends to sell its own software through a subscription model which charges by the user, responds to an unmet need in the market, said Gardner.

"The architectures of the generation before and a lot of the existing enterprise stack need to be retrofitted to expose their transactions to Web services," said the SOASTA CEO. "Every time we go through one of these big generational changes you get a lot of opportunity to go back to a blank sheet of paper."

The market for tools that automate testing of the extensible mark-up language that makes Web services possible represents just such a "white-field," he said. Not only will the software ultimately improve programming efficiency by automating tasks that are now done by hand, said Gardner, but it's also something that regulations mandate.

"[Sarbanes-Oxley section] 404 requires the certification of transaction systems," he said. "Testing things like Web applications is not optional."

The round of funding is expected to last SOASTA for the next 14 months, according to Gardner. The Mountain View, Calif.-based company has 10 employees and is currently filing patents to protect its technology.

Editorial Contact:
Jonathan Shieber
Reporter
Dow Jones Venture Capital Analyst
jonathan.shieber@dowjones.com