Acquisition of Preflight – Moshe Milman, Applitools

This is Techstrong tv. Hi everyone. Welcome back to techstrong tv.

I'm really happy to do this next interview and bring you this, uh, news, um, uh, exciting stuff. Let me introduce you to Mosha Millman. Mosha is co-founder and CTO o is it Mosha of, of Apple Tools.

C o o Co o, chief Operating Officer of Apple Tools. For those of you who watch Techstrong TV often, you know, apple Tools is not a stranger to our, to our show and to our audience. We're usually lucky to have Gil ever the c e o of app Apple Tools on with us, and we've never, as a result had a chance to interview Mosha here.

So we're really happy to have him join us. Mosha, welcome to techstrong tv and thanks for being here with us today. Yeah, thanks for having me on.

I'm a big fan and, uh, it's a pleasure to be here. Pleasure. So, Mosha, before we jump into today's news, let's talk a little bit about, as I mentioned, you haven't been on, we usually have Gil who is co-founder, ceo, but you're co-founder too.

Why don't we get a little bit of your background, a little bit of your story? Yeah, sure. Um, happy to share.

So again, I've been with Apto. I mean, we started Aptos more than, uh, 10 years ago now. And, um, I've been working with Gill and Adam with Sure.

Um, my other two co-founders for the last almost 20 years now. Uh, we've been working before the previous startup company that got acquired. It was called, uh, safe End, and uh, then we started Apli Tools, and then we started the company in Tel Aviv.

Spent the few first few years building the product and testing the market, finding product market fit, and I moved to the us uh, around 2016 to help build a US part of the business sales marketing go to market. And this has been my main focus over the past, uh, uh, the past few years. Absolutely.

Um, and Moshi, you know what, not everyone out here of course will be familiar with, uh, with Apple Tools. I think most, most of our audiences we're, you know, pretty focused audience, but for those who maybe are not familiar or not sure, why don't you give them a little bit of the Apli tools story? Sure, a hundred percent.

So, um, yeah, so apli tools, uh, maybe just to start with a brief intro, like why we started APLI Tools and how we started it. So in previous companies, we always had challenges with testing and testing. Always was kind of like left behind and was, uh, running late and was causing delays in, uh, uh, in releases and we're trying to find tools or solutions to solve it.

And we spoke with all the vendors out there and no one had a good solution that could actually solve this problem. And we felt that there has to be a better way to solve it. And, um, with the advancement of, uh, machine learning and ai, which again, was in its infantry, but back then we felt that there has to be better ways to solve this problem.

And our mission is to, um, improve testing processes, um, make testing better with ai. The first solution that we launched to the market, which was called Aptos Eyes, was focused on the visual and functional testing through visual ai, which looks at the application screens and compare them between different versions and on different and environments. And, uh, we have now hundreds of enterprise customers across the globe that are using this, uh, uh, this technology.

And our focus now is to continue to expand it organically as well as through acquisitions to be able to help solve problems in each and every step of the testing, uh, life cycle and modernize testing with with ai. Sure. And, and, you know, for many of us Apple tools sort of define the, the visual testing, if you will, uh, category, right, and, and look testing today and always, frankly, but more so I think even today testing has such a, there's a wide range of kinds of tests of the things you test.

Is it unit testing, load testing, code testing, security testing is, is, you know, part and parcel of that now. Uh, UI and visual testing and, and all of user experience testing there. There's so many different aspects to testing and, and of course in a DevOps world where the, we're continuously deploying, we're also continuously testing, right?

And we gotta get those feedback loops and taking the test results and, and, you know, working the next and, and iterations and so forth. Um, so testing is, I mean, there's a lot in there, right? There's, there's a lot to it.

Now you mentioned Apple Tools sort of expanding. Its, its, uh, portfolio, if you will, of solutions within testing. And look, I I've been an entrepreneur, you know, serial entrepreneur doing tech, uh, VC backed startups for years.

There's basically two ways of doing it. You could organically develop or via acquisition. My experience is as companies get older and bigger and more mature, sometimes it's harder for them to organically develop not what they started with, right?

They're gonna continue developing that, but analogists or adjacent categories, it's actually a faster time to market right? To, to some acquisitions. And if you have the wherewithal and, um, apple Tools has some news on this.

Yeah. Yes. Yeah, definitely.

Yeah. And I think you describe it correctly. I mean, we constantly look for ways to expand and we recently launched a couple new products organically with our self execution cloud, but we are also looking for ways to, uh, expand and accelerate our growth.

And one of the ways to do it, like you mentioned it, through acquisitions and, uh, with Aptos in the last few years, we had a really good solution that can serve companies that already have test automation in place. So if the companies already have a test automation with open source tools like Selenium or Cypress or playwright, and they have developers maintaining these tests, they have a perfect solution for them. They can, within a few lines of code, they layer visual AI and start enjoying all the benefits of Apli tools for validation, for execution of the test, the self filling capabilities, et cetera.

But we didn't have a solution for companies that didn't yet have test automation in place, or companies that didn't have the developer skills or developer resources available to, uh, write and maintain their automated tests. And we're looking for ways to, uh, offer solutions in the no-code, low-code, uh, space. And again, in the last two years, I think we looked at probably 20 different companies in that space.

There is, this space has been evolving, uh, pretty heavily in the last few years, and there are lots of companies that are playing in that, uh, field. And, um, we look for a company with like really strong technology based on AI that can fit well with our vision, with our, uh, technology stack and preflight, we decided to acquire preflight. That's the, that's the news.

And, uh, preflight really impressed us with their, uh, technology and with their modern, uh, uh, application that they built, which is really user-friendly, which makes it easy for any user in the, uh, organization to generate automated tests really easily without writing any code, without requiring any, um, significant, uh, uh, customization or, uh, integration. So, uh, so this was the main reason for that, uh, uh, for that acquisition. Excellent, excellent.

And, and you're right there. Ha, low-code, no, this whole low-code, no-code area has been, uh, I mean, just exploding through co I think Covid helped accelerate it, right? Because, uh, you know, we had to get stuff done quickly, we had to get stuff done remotely and, and so forth.

But also, I, I think it's just the state of, of where we are, right? Um, so, so it happens, so pre-flight is, is is the acquisition. Can you give us kind of, uh, pre-acquisition, pre-flight, who it is, people, places, products, and then how does that, how is that going to, what's the plan?

Cuz this just happened, obviously. What's the plan to integrate this into appli tools? Yeah, sure.

Uh, a hundred percent. So pre-flight, they're, um, uh, their founder, um, was based in Chicago. His name is, uh, Mustafa.

And, uh, he built this company from the ground up. He was a Y Combinator, um, uh, in the Y Combinator plan. And he worked with a lot of the YC companies to test and evolve the product and work until he get to the market, uh, to the product market fit.

And, uh, they built a really unique, uh, product. Um, like you mentioned, like, you know, there's a lot of solutions in that space, but although there are many solutions in a low-code, low-code space, when you look at the market landscape today company, a lot of companies are still doing manual testing and there is a tremendous amount of manual testing that's been done. And we're still seeing companies spend tens and hundreds of millions every year on manual testing resources and manual testing processes.

And this really limits the ability of companies to get to continuous delivery, to continuous testing, uh, you know, all these process advanced processes you mentioned, which we're seeing more and more companies do it, but still the majority of the market is not, uh, is not there. So preflight really focused on to on solving these, uh, problems. They have, um, uh, distributed team.

They're like a fully remote companies, so they have engineers, um, in different regions, uh, of the, of the world. And, um, our goal with this acquisition is to bring this to, uh, be part of the atos platform, bring the Freeflight team to be part of the, uh, of the atos team and work together with them to continue expanding this, uh, uh, product. I mean, now they have tens of customers, we have hundreds of customers.

We believe that many of our customers can enjoy, uh, the benefits of, uh, uh, preflight. And of course there are many more customers out there which can enjoy these benefits of the combined, uh, preflight and alto's, uh, uh, solution. And what makes preflight unique?

I mean, maybe just to, um, may answer your question a bit more directly. So my, what makes it unique is that you can really easily generate automated tests in multiple ways. I mean, one way is you have a recorder, so you can go, like, again, many other, uh, solutions.

You can go open your browser, interact with the application, and as you're doing it, it records and generates automated tests. But what's unique about it is as you're recording this test, it helps you make these tests scalable so you don't have to later, like, you know, deal with the data parameterization as you're recording the test. Every time it recognizes a place with data input, it immediately helps you parameterize this data and get test data generated to, uh, you know, to support running this test at scale.

It helps you deal with email validation, file downloads, all the things that usually happens when you interact with an application and you need to deal with, which used to be really painful with all their tools, which had to write custom JavaScript and a lot of things to make it work. Now we can do it in instantly, and also it allows you to just record what your users are doing in the application. So there is also an option to just put a snippet on your application, on staging or, um, on test environment.

And as your users are playing with the application, it can generate tests based on this activity. So there is multiple ways to create these tests without writing code, as well as really sophisticated editor that allows you to edit the test without a lot of maintenance efforts, which makes it really easy to, um, to scale automated testing. Great.

Um, you know, I've done a lot of acquisitions over my years. Ive been acquired, also did a lot of acquisitions for a company I, I helped, uh, put together. Um, you know, the, the stand, the standard thing is, look, you gotta let it, you know, you don't come in and start pot screwing.

I don't know if you know what the word patching means, but you don't come in and start pot screwing with you. You gotta kinda let it sit for six months and acclimate and, and all of that. Um, what, what's the plan here for integration into Apple tools or the, you know, broader offering?

Yeah, so, uh, so, so like you mentioned, we, we don't wanna just, you know, like kind of like, uh, tear it apart or, uh, replace everything. I mean, we definitely really appreciate the technology and the, uh, innovation that the preflight team built. And we believe there is a lot out there that the market can enjoy right now without any, uh, changes or, uh, or modifications.

So the plan is to release the product, like to, the product is already out in the market, but like we release the product to the market and allow companies to buy it as a standalone solution even without Apple tools right now. And companies will be able to, uh, start using it and enjoy it and uh, uh, use it as it is. And over the course of the next few months, we'll start integrating it with the Aptos, uh, platform.

Our vision at the end of the day is to help infuse AI into each and every step in the testing, uh, life cycle. And like you mentioned, there is many different types of testing activities. And traditionally we've been very focused on, or like, not traditionally, historically, we've been very focused on the valid test validation test, maintenance, test execution parts.

Now, we would like to also help tackle the test creation part and infuse AI into this, uh, phase of the product. So initially companies will be able to do it with pre-flight, uh, standalone, and over time we integrate it into the Aptos platform and you'll be able to, uh, create the test with, uh, pre-flight, but still enjoy the visual AI benefits from Apli tools. As you, uh, create these tests, you'll be able to execute, execute this test on the Aptos, uh, uh, test cloud and get all the benefits of the automated maintenance.

And at the end of the day, get to like fully autonomous testing platform, which can serve companies with existing automated tests using open source tools like Selenium and Cypress and playwright and others, as well as sure companies which don't yet have automated tests and would like to start from scratch or would like to build it without, uh, developer, uh, involved. So again, I realize it's early, but a timeframe for this is, is there any sort of working timeframe at this point when we might see that? Yeah, sure.

So, um, the, um, uh, the integration is tend to be launched in the, um, in the last quarter of this, uh, of this year. So this is where the integrated product will, uh, will be released with atos eyes and the pre-flight kind of like running together. Uh, we're planning to launch our kind of like next generation of the product during next year.

And there's like lots of exciting things coming, uh, coming up over there. This is probably a topic for a separate, uh, a separate interview, but we believe that this will really change the game of how, uh, companies do uh, how companies do testing. And one thing that's interesting to mention here, it's interesting to also hear your perspective about it, but when I look at the overall software development life cycle, I mean, when you look at design and development and testing, I mean the areas of design and development went through a tremendous disruption in the last few years.

I mean, when you look at design, almost every company now use Figma and other modern solutions. And these tools, I mean, changed dramatically from what happened like 10 years ago. I mean, look at the development with Kubernetes and cloud platforms and all the modern, uh, frontend development stack that's available now for companies.

Again, almost every company is now using completely different tools than what they used 10 years ago. And these processes also advanced and the velocity is much faster. Companies are trying to do continuous delivery release multiple times per day.

But when you look at testing, testing hasn't really gone through that disruption. I mean, a lot of companies are still using the same tools and processes that they used five and 10 years ago, and it's the same vendors that's been involved in that space for many years. And we believe that this area is really up for disruption, up for innovation, especially with the recent progress of, uh, generative AI and all these other things that are happening in the market.

So we would like to try to, um, to tackle this program and help this market, uh, evolve, help companies with better, uh, better solutions in that space. So that's our main goal with the new platform that we're, uh, that we're working on. I think you're dead on with that.

I, I think for whatever reason, testing was a bit of a redheaded stepchild compared to design and development where those areas were constantly evolving and improving. Testing was testing, right? It, it was, and then with the advent of DevOps and automated and the idea, anyway, the concept of automated continuous testing, scripting out your tests so that they run automatically, the, the, the focus moved from a tester to a person who could script for automated testing.

The guy who, or the per, not just a guy, a gal, a person who who sets up the automated testing right, became more important than the actual maybe person doing the testing. Cuz with the automated testing, we could build it into the pipeline, the developer could kick it off, right? And, and that was state of the art 10 years ago, let's say.

Right? That's, that was the big change. But you're right, we, we haven't now we've added, as I said at the top, we've added security to the testing stuff.

We've added different kinds of test testing for what, but the, the, the, the Tools and concept there has been rather static. I think AI's a complete game changer for this because now the same way we move the focus from the person doing a test to the person scripting the test, I think AI takes that person's place perhaps, right? And now, okay, so now where's the focus?

Right? Where's the person now and, you know, find the person and what can we and what does that mean? It's gonna be interesting.

We're actually, um, I haven't announced it yet, but we're doing something not just around testing, but around how generative and large language module and AI is gonna affect this whole DevOps, uh, way of doing things. And we're, we're gonna do something in August here in our offices in Boca with like a, I don't want to, I'm, we're gonna announce it soon. Stay tuned.

Um, yeah, but I, I think you're right, most we're outta time though, but for people who wanna get more information both about Apple Tools and Flight Pat, where, where can they go? Yeah, sure. So in the Apple Tools, uh, website, you can get all the information about Apple Tools and we now have, like after the acquisition, we have a banner kind of like referring, announcing the acquisition and referring people to the pre-flight side.

So with one clicks they can go into, uh, into pre-flight and enjoy, uh, bright and would love to get feedback and, uh, um, get people using it. Great. Mosha, thank you for coming on today.

I appreciate it. I've, and, uh, you did great on your First Techstrong tv. We hope to see you back here soon.

Thanks, guys. It's been a pleasure. Appreciate it all.

All right. Mosha Melman, C O o Apple Tools acquisition of Pre-flight. com.

We'll be right back here in just a moment.