Gabriel Investments invests $600K in Indian test automation startup with local roots

Center City investment fund Gabriel Investments invested $600,000 in test automation startup eureQa’s seed round.
Sashi Reddi of Gabriel Investments will join eureQA’s board.
eureQa’s cofounders work out of a Cherry Hill, N.J., office but the bulk of the company’s staff is based out of Hyderabad, India, said cofounder Badri Nittoor. They have three employees based in the U.S. (the two cofounders and a project manager) and 55 in India. The company shares a staff with Tripod Technologies, an outsourced software development company run by the same team (Nittoor and cofounder Bhargava “Bari” Chittamuri).
With the new funds, eureQa plans to grow its Indian development team by 20 and its U.S. office by about three, hiring for sales and marketing roles.
Why build an offshore team?
It wasn’t always this way, said Nittoor, 47, of Voorhees, N.J.
“We initially had a lot of our team in the US, but after 2008 there was a greater interest among our customers to get their software development done offshore,” Nittoor wrote in an email.
Nittoor and Chittamuri decided to take a similar approach to building their own product because it was cost-effective and because they already had a team in place.
“We handled product management, engineering management and sales from the US, but worked with our team in India to build and manage it,” Nittoor said.