21Labs

Shani Shoham

Campbell, California
CEO, 21Labs (Acquired by Providence Strategic Growth Fund)

21Labs is an autonomous testing and analytics platform that lets mobile app developers and engineering teams accelerate their release cycle and perfect the user experience for Android and iOS applications.

Throughout my career, I have worked for and founded various technology companies and venture capital funds. One company I worked for provided the infrastructure for test automation, but you still needed engineers to write the scripts and manage them. That led to low test coverage and increased cost of testing. Using the knowledge I had gained and what I saw as a gap in the market, I started 21 Labs to further automate the process of UI testing and functional testing of mobile applications.

We integrated and partnered with companies like Perforce, Sauce Labs and others to provide the infrastructure to our customers. These partners also reached out to us for joint GTM activities and introduced us to their customers. It made the acquisition the next step in the natural progression.

I stayed at Perforce to help with integration, but once that was settled and my contractual obligations were up, it was time for me to move on to the next thing. Earlier this year I left Perforce to become the Chief Revenue Officer at a new startup that is focused on software development, testing, demo and deployment environments to help speed software release cycles.

The acquisition of 21 by Perforce was a success and the right move for us, and I hope policymakers don’t make these sorts of transactions more difficult. However, one issue that we ran into with 21 is talent. There simply is not enough skilled labor—developers—to be able to recruit and retain the talent we need. As a startup, we couldn’t really compete with the compensation packages that large established companies were offering, especially in the Bay Area. While we would have loved to help build the local economy through employment too, we ended up relying on developers from Eastern Europe to grow 21. Part of the answer to this talent problem has to be making it easier for immigrants to come to the U.S.