Instabug, an Egyptian startup that helps mobile developers monitor, discover, and fix bugs in their apps, has raised $46 million in a Series B round led by Insight Partners. The funding comes a little over two years after the company received $5 million in a Series A round led by Accel, which increased its investment in the new round. Forgepoint Capital and Endeavor, two new investors, also invested in the round. The fresh injection brings the total capital the company has raised to $54 million.
Since its last raise, a lot has changed for Instabug, which has offices in both Cairo and San Francisco. For one reason, the company has shifted its attention away from bug and crash reporting and toward developing application performance monitoring software “to capture everything about mobile performance.”
Enabling More Possibilities For Companies Over their Apps
The company was founded in 2013, first published its offering in beta in 2015, and then publicly debuted in February 2016 during its time at Y Combinator. Instabug CEO and co-founder Omar Gabr revealed that the company’s recent move to expand into monitoring was motivated by the fact that users have higher expectations from the apps they use, and companies need to be more proactive to prevent bugs from occurring in the first place. For example, he claims that four years ago, it was deemed suitable if an app didn’t crash. Users today want apps to not only not crash but be slick and fast.
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“Our goal is to make sure that the developers and the engineering teams building apps have full visibility about how that app operates and is performing,” he said. “We want to give them the right tools to be proactive. For example, they can see if an issue is happening and understand what’s happening before a user gives bad reviews or ranting on Twitter.”
Gabr further shared that in 2021, the company’s software was installed on 2.7 billion mobile devices, processing 110 billion mobile sessions (up at least 20x from 2020) and helping customers with 4.2 billion issues.
According to Gabr, Instabug had “historic” growth in 2021, with its ARR doubling and the number of enterprise customers growing 10 times, bringing in new clients like DoorDash, Verizon, Qualtrics, Porsche, and Gojek to join current ones such as Clubhouse. Instabug has “several” Fortune 500 firms and top 100 apps on the app store as customers, he added.
Combining Performance Monitoring With Crash Reporting
With so much enterprise adoption, Instabug spent more money last year on compliance and security so it could onboard big organizations like banks and telecoms. One of the key drivers of the company’s revenue growth has been attracting more enterprise clients.
“Before for large companies, mobile was nice to have, but now, it’s a must-have — a core product, not just a channel or marketing thing. Mobile, in general, has been around for 15 years, but with the pandemic, it became the primary way users interface with brands and services around them.”
When an app breaks, Instabug instantly sends a notification to the customer. However, the company claims it goes beyond crash reporting to provide mobile developers with granular information such as where bugs are located, how an app performs in general, and when it completely fails.
“There are so many alternatives to apps out there, and if users don’t like one, they’ll delete and use another. Companies can’t afford to be reactive to issues.”
Combining performance monitoring with crash reporting was the “missing piece of the puzzle,” Gabr said.
“The data we gather helps us make our product better. Now they can get the full picture of every interaction happening on the phone and if the customer is having an excellent experience or a bad one,” he added.
Ganesh Bell, managing director of Insight Partners, affirms that Instabug was “developers’ most trusted solution for performance monitoring on the mobile app stack” after conducting due diligence.
“Because Instabug focuses on mobile platforms exclusively, we believe it has the best mobile-specific capabilities and comprehensive mobile platform and framework coverage. Instabug is flexible enough to deploy on a single app or for testing in a development environment but can immediately scale to monitor even the largest global enterprises’ app portfolios,” says Bell.
More About Instabug
Instabug operates on a standard SaaS business model, charging developers of mobile apps an annual subscription fee based on the size of the app. For example, if your app has less than 10,000 monthly active users, the product is free. According to Gabr, as a company expands and more sessions are completed on their app, they pay more. In other words, Instabug’s revenue is directly proportional to the number of sessions processed on its customers’ apps.
The company intends to use its new funding toward expanding its team and investing in product development. Presently, it has 190 employees, with a predominantly Cairo-based engineering team.