TestingTime is the European leader in test user recruitment. Global firms such as UBS or Google have worked with TestingTime and recruited individuals for usability tests, interviews, focus groups and online surveys. Today it was announced that Norstat has acquired TestingTime. Norstat is the leading data collector for market research services in Northern Europe and since 2019, is owned by Triton, a private equity firm that has raised more than EUR 15 billion so far.

Reto Lämmler and Oliver Ganz founded TestingTime in 2015. Reto had been a former early employee of Doodle, the free online meeting scheduling tool, that was sold to Tamedia in 2014. Doodle’s founders Mike Näf and Paul Sevinç were also early backers of TestingTime when Verve Ventures led TestingTime’s Seed financing round in 2015.

The secular shift to online business and e-commerce is a challenge for businesses around the globe. They will only succeed if their digital offering is based on excellent usability and user-friendliness. We invested in TestingTime because we’re convinced that involving test users early in the design process is a key factor for companies to ensure that new products succeed in the market. TestingTime’s automated service made recruiting test users, which is usually expensive and takes time, very easy.

We were also able to leverage our investor network and brought successful entrepreneur Mark Sandmeier to join TestingTime’s board of directors. Mark was CEO of Jobs.ch.

“This successful exit is no surprise, as the market of user experience and testing is growing very fast and TestingTime’s team has established a strong position in the market”, says Mark Sandmeier.

In 2018, Verve Ventures was the lead investor in TestingTime’s Series A financing round, when we co-invested with our close partner ZKB, and brought another institutional investor on board, Swiss Post.

“Swiss Post is designing hundreds of new user apps, interfaces and websites per year. In this context, TestingTime helped Swiss Post accelerate its focus on building state-of-the-art customer experiences. The investment in TestingTime was financially rewarding but also generated successful collaborations with Swiss Post business units”, says Olivier Laplace of Swiss Post Ventures.

Again, we were able to find the right candidates for TestingTime’s board of directors in our investor network: Twan Vollebregt, a successful serial entrepreneur who has already taken two startups from idea to exit, and Chris Grossmann, who leads Beekeeper, the frontline worker app that has recently raised a USD 55 million Series B.

With this setup, TestingTime was ready to scale across Europe and to become Europe’s leader in test user recruitment.

“By 2018 TestingTime had proven itself in Switzerland, and the next step was to tackle internationalisation and achieve scale. The Series A financing round was the perfect moment to expand and strengthen the board to achieve this. It was a pleasure to closely work with the founders and other board members, and achieve a successful exit 3 years later”, says Twan Vollebregt.

Preparing the sale of a startup to a larger company such as Norstat is a process that needs to be accompanied by experts. Therefore, we also introduce TestingTime to Jon Roberts from Menalto Advisors, a specialized Tech M&A firm, which was involved in the exit process.

“After leading our financing rounds, Verve Ventures continued to deliver. We got support for our new management setup and have received tailored support in our exit directions from the teams of Verve Ventures and their partners”, says Reto Lämmler, CEO of TestingTime.

As this example shows, Verve Ventures is a reliable partner for startups from the early days until the exit, and we can leverage our large network to strengthen a startup’s position at the right time.