Reflect’s cofounders raised a $1.8M seed, picking up investors at Y Combinator’s Demo Day

The pair behind SaaS startup Reflect, which makes a tool that automates website and web application testing, have raised $1.8 million in seed funding after wrapping up their time in Y Combinator’s summer 2020 cohort.

Curalate alumni Todd McNeal and Fitz Nowlan cofounded Reflect last year, and recently added two new developers to their team. This funding, with participating investors Battery Ventures, Craft Ventures, Soma Capital and Y Combinator, will allow the team to accelerate their efforts in building a no-code testing platform for devs and non-devs alike. The cofounders were introduced to their investors at Y Combinator’s Demo Day.

When we last checked in, McNeal and Nowlan were about halfway through the prominent accelerator’s 12-week virtual cohort. The pandemic-time switch to remote made it possible for the founders — who both have young kids and weren’t willing to move — to participate.

“Up until joining Y Combinator, we were focusing a lot on the product, and it’s a hard technical product,” McNeal said last summer. “We’ve talked to customers who have validated the product but now [the work] is more around, ‘How do we make this into a business?’”

McNeal told Technical.ly some of the biggest things they took away from the international accelerator were the strategic day-to-day things like knowing which guideposts to use when emailing prospective clients, or how to keep themselves accountable on goals. The founders detailed some more of the technical aspects of the evolving end-to-end testing platform in a recent blog post.

“A lot of culture of the [Y Combinator] program is in these office hours where you’re meeting with a group, or with your partners,” McNeal said this week. “And we learned that the more you’re honest about what is and isn’t working, the more we got out of it.”

The pair are now hiring for an account executive sales role, and are focusing their 2021 on getting more customers. Over the summer, they were serving 20, and now have 80 paying clients.

Since the startup has mainly operated amid the pandemic, McNeal said the team will eventually have to consider what their work situation might look like in a post-COVID world. There are some successful aspects about their current remote setup, but they’re thinking ahead, considering candidates in Philadelphia or Seattle for eventual IRL work.

“What are the things that we miss about working together?” he said. “There is a balance, we want people to be able to work from home and be flexible, and make it to their kid’s soccer game, but I do want to work with people I like. I want to see them, go to lunch with them, brainstorm together.”