The original Smart Bear company was founded by Jason Cohen in 2003. The current SmartBear Software is the result of Insight Venture Partners acquiring three companies, Smart Bear, AutomatedQA and Pragmatic Software, between 2007 and early 2009. These companies operated as AQA Holdings until being rebranded as SmartBear Software in 2010. After the rebranding, the company acquired Eviware in 2011, leading to API promoter and SoapUI's founder, Ole Lensmar, joining the company. He later served as chief technology officer of SmartBear. That same year, the company acquired APM vendor AlertSite. In 2013 SmartBear acquired Spanish APM vendor Lucierna. SmartBear then acquired the Open Source CommunitySwagger in 2015 and its founder, Tony Tam, joined the company as head of products for Swagger and the commercial version of Swagger, SwaggerHub. In 2016, SmartBear acquired CrossBrowserTesting.com and Ken Hamric, founder of CBT, joined the company as general manager of CrossBrowserTesting.com. In 2017, Francisco Partners acquired a majority stake in SmartBear Software.
Company organization
SmartBear is based in the Greater Boston Area and has U.S. offices in Texas, Tennessee, and Florida. SmartBear also has offices and development centers in Ireland and Sweden. SmartBear's current CEO is Justin Teague.
Products
SmartBear Software offers 16 commercial products in the following categories: API readiness, software testing, monitoring, code collaboration and code optimization, and two open-source tools: SoapUI and Swagger. For API readiness, SmartBear's products include SoapUI Pro for API functional testing, Secure Pro for API security testing, LoadUI Pro for API load testing, and SwaggerHub, a Swagger-based API editor. SmartBear's software testing tools include TestComplete for automated testing, LoadComplete for load testing, TestLeft for functional testing, and CrossBrowserTesting, a cloud testing platform. For monitoring, AlertSite is SmartBear's application quality and performance monitoring tool. For code collaboration and code optimization, SmartBear offers Collaborator as a code review & document review tool, and AQtime Pro for performance profiling.
