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Stevens-Smith has spent more than a decade on one problem: making software QA fast enough that teams stop treating it as a bottleneck.
Fred Stevens-Smith is co-founder and chief executive of Rainforest QA, a San Francisco software testing company whose no-code platform uses AI to draft, run, and repair regression tests.
Starting Out as a Web Designer
Stevens-Smith started in business as a web designer running a one-man shop, as he told Hacker Noon. He and his co-founder Russell Smith both come from England, he said on Flyover Labs, and he has described Smith as one of the first AWS experts in Europe. The pair chose developer tools because the need for productivity was clear.
Joining Y Combinator in 2012
Their first ideas did not work. Rainforest went through four pivots and struggled to monetize an earlier product before the founders went looking for problems people would pay to solve, as Stevens-Smith told freeCodeCamp. They landed on QA, joined Y Combinator in 2012, and began by running customers' testing by hand before automating each step.
Rebuilding Rainforest Around AI
Rainforest first ran tests through a large crowd of testers, which Stevens-Smith has called the hardest and riskiest part of the business to coordinate. The company later raised a $12 million Series A led by Bessemer Venture Partners and has moved toward AI that maps an app, drafts tests, and fixes them when the interface changes.
Personal Life
Stevens-Smith grew up in England and leads Rainforest QA as co-founder and CEO. Hacker Noon described him as building an award-winning company culture alongside the product.
