CA Technologies to Acquire Israeli Startup BlazeMeter for $90 Million

Most or all of startup’s staff will stay on as Israeli R&D employees of U.S. company.

Sep 22, 2016

Anti-Semites invest less in the stock market and earn less, study finds (illustrative).Credit: Dreamstime

Sep 22, 2016

CA Technologies said on Tuesday it had agreed to acquire BlazeMeter, a maker of software for performance testing of mobile and web applications. Terms of the agreement were not disclosed, but sources said the U.S. company paid $90 million.

“While nothing compares to the feeling of building an independent company from scratch, I believe it is the right time for BlazeMeter to join forces with CA Technologies — one of the top leaders in enterprise software,” BlazeMeter CEO Alon Girmonsky wrote on the company’s website.

The acquisition, which CA said it expected to complete by the end of the year, will enable the company to expand its DevOps portfolio of products. DevOps aims to accelerate app development and updates.

Testing speed is the major bottleneck in getting applications released faster. BlazeMeter’s solution enables developers and performance engineers to test apps earlier and more often in their life cycle to avoid finding performance problems too close to their rollout date. Its products work with open source tools like Apache JMeter, Selenium and Gatling.

“BlazeMeter has redefined performance testing with its simplicity, fast-deployment SaaS model, and rapid time-to-value,” said Ayman Sayed, president and chief product officer of CA Technologies.

Founded in 2011 by CEO Alon Girmonsky, the company raised $10.5 million, mainly from YL Ventures, an Israeli-U.S. fund, as well as Gilot Capital Partners, Inimiti Capital Partners and WTI. BlazeMeter is headquartered in Palo Alto, California, but its research and development offices are in Israel, as are most of its 60 employees.

CA, which already has an R&D center in Israel, will turn BlazeMeter into a local R&D operation. “Most or all of BlazeMeter’s employees will join CA to continue work on the system they built,” said Yoav Andrew Leitersdorf, YL’s managing partner.