The round was led by BIP Capital, a leading U.S. venture capital fund operating in the U.S.’s southeast, with the support of several of Kobiton’s seed investors, including the U.S-based software developer KMS Technology and venture fund Kinetic Ventures.

The funds will go towards marketing, customer support, development and general expansion of Kobiton’s mobile app experience business. With another $3 million raised last October from Kinetic Ventures, the company will also work to expand the features on its platform and incorporate artificial intelligence (AI), said Kelvin Lee, CEO of Kobiton.

Kobiton was launched in 2016 by a team of five Vietnamese engineers at UpStar Labs, the start-up incubation arm of KMS Technology. The platform improves mobile app user experiences by offering manual and automated testing of apps on real devices, aiming to optimize efficiency and minimize costs.

Currently, the platform has been used by over 500 companies and 35,000 testers, including large corporations like French multinational tech consultant Capgemini and U.S. low cost carrier Frontier Airlines, according to Kobiton.

"Organizations are finding it challenging to adopt mobile test automation at scale. The unique requirements of utilizing real devices, coupled with the complexity of developing test automation scripts, has allowed, up to now, only the most sophisticated organizations to tackle this challenge," said Dan Drechsel, Senior Vice President at BIP Capital.

Kobiton seeks to address this by leveraging its vast experience in real-device testing and adding AI-powered test automation technology to its platform, Drechsel added.

Kobiton currently has a team of 40 engineers, 30 of whom are from Vietnam, while KMS Technology has premises in Vietnam that employs around 900 people.