The company was founded in 2009 when SmartBear, AutomatedQA and Pragmatic Software were acquired by Insight Venture Partners.

[2] Insight Venture Partners acquired three companies, Smart Bear, AutomatedQA and Pragmatic Software, between 2007 and early 2009.

The company's first product was AQtime, a binary instrumentation profiler to help optimize performance for applications developed with Microsoft and Borland compilers.

The first version of TestComplete, AutomatedQA's automated software testing tool, was released in December 2000.

[16] SmartBear also has offices and development centers in Ireland, India, Finland, Poland, Melbourne, and Sweden.