QA Symphony

QA Symphony was founded in 2011 by Voolam and Josh Lieberman, both coming from KMS, a services company based in Saigon, Vietnam. They had a bold vision: build the next generation agile testing platform. To validate the idea, they took 30 developers from their services business and started QA Symphony in a separate building, funding it themselves through an intense two-and-a-half-year R&D phase. However, by 2014, the company had stalled at just $500k in annual run rate—a promising product trapped by a go-to-market problem.

The founders had built something technically strong but lacked the sales and marketing infrastructure to scale it. When David Kyle joined in spring 2014, he brought complementary strengths: sales, marketing, and finance expertise. Kyle had just completed the sale of Digistrive, an e-commerce company, and the timing aligned perfectly. The company had around 200 customers at that point, but they were small deals—a product-market fit problem dressed up as a customer acquisition problem.

Kyle's first major move was strategic: instead of optimizing for small customers, they would go upmarket. "It was an evolution," Kyle explained. "It wasn't just one day we pressed a button and suddenly went up market. We were able to do [it] gradually over the past four years, each and every quarter have seen a nice uptick in our ASP."

Two things made this possible. First, they built a "very unique and differentiated integration" with Atlassian's JIRA—the ubiquitous developer platform. This integration became a key competitive moat. Second, they realized that while many innovative firms did what QA Symphony did, none could scale to large enterprises. "As we built up the scalability, we were able to replace some of the legacy players with really the only solution that was both innovative and could scale to large enterprises."

The team invested heavily in sales infrastructure, bringing in experienced SaaS sales leadership and building a sophisticated enterprise sales process. Early wins came quickly: Nordstrom, Barclays, and Amazon became flagship customers. Financial services, e-commerce, and technology became their core verticals.

The most striking metric: by early 2017, nearly 80% of leads came through inbound marketing. This wasn't paid ads or partnerships—it was content, thought leadership, and the network effects of the JIRA integration drawing enterprises to their door. Kyle didn't disclose CAC, but noted it was in the top quartile for SaaS companies, with a customer payback period targeting the SaaS gold standard of 12 months.

Retention became their secret weapon. They built a "very strong customer retention team" that delivered 115% gross revenue retention—top decile performance. That translated to 85–90% logo retention with 25–30% expansion revenue from existing customers. Most expansion came from larger organizations switching away from Micro Focus (which acquired HP's QA business) due to cost-cutting and lack of innovation.

By April 2017, QA Symphony had grown to $20M ARR—a 4,000% increase in three years. They served 570 customers paying an average of $50k per year (or $30–50k+ for new enterprise deals). The company had raised $47.5M across three rounds: $2.5M Series A (2015), $5M Series B (2016), and $40M from Insight Ventures (2017). Forbes named them the #8 fastest-growing software company in 2017.

The team had scaled to 130 people: 40 in Vietnam (product and engineering), 85 in Atlanta (HQ), and a growing sales office in London. With 115% net revenue retention, a target 12-month CAC payback, and plans to reach cash flow positivity in 2017, QA Symphony had proven that a technology-first team could scale into an enterprise juggernaut when paired with world-class go-to-market leadership.