Crashlytics, a crash reporting solution for mobile developers, today announced it has closed $1 million in seed funding in a round led by investment firms Flybridge Capital Partners and Baseline Ventures. The new service, available as an SDK for iOS developers (Android soon), is currently in private beta testing.
Angels investors in the round include David Chang (COO at Where, a PayPal company), Lars Albright (cofounder of Quattro, now Apple iAds), Chris Sheehan (Managing Partner at CommonAngels), Ty Danco (Founder, eSecLending and FX Aligned), Jennifer Lum (former VP at Quattro, now Apple iAds), Roy Rodenstein (founder of Going.com and a former Director of Business Planning at AOL), Joe Caruso (Managing Partner at Bantam Group), and others.
Crashlytics aims to address the needs of app makers to better understand what sort of bugs their mobile applications are experiencing. Today, when an iOS app crashes, the user does one of a few things – they delete the app, they head to the App Store and leave a bad review, or they do nothing at all. Although Apple has a built-in mechanism for handling crash reports, the roundtrip takes a couple of weeks before it shows up in the developer’s dashboard. That’s a long enough take to fully infuriate a lot more users, while the developer is oblivious to the problem.
To access crash logs faster, many developers today are using open source or ad-hoc solutions of their own, like those that send crash reports via email, but often quickly become overwhelmed by the amount of data there is to parse. Which crashes are the top issues? Is the app only crashing on jailbroken devices? Maybe it’s just affecting those running older versions of the iOS software? And so on.
With Crashlytics’ service, which includes its own online dashboard, crash logs are distilled down, highlighting the real issues, detailing the device’s state at the time of crash (software version, orientation, model, etc.) and it even shows developers the exact line of code that the app crashed on. That feature alone will probably make the service worthwhile for many.
The lightweight Crashlytics SDK (around 75KB) works alongside other SDKs without any problem. At launch, the pricing model will be freemium, but details are not yet available. An Android version is also in the works, but is not available at this time.
Crashlytics was founded by Jeff Seibert and Wayne Chang, both serial entrepreneurs. Seibert co-founded Increo Solutions, Inc., which was acquired by Box.net in 2009. He also worked for Apple in the past. Wayne Chang founded i2hub, a popular file sharing company, in the mid-2000’s. He’s also an active angel investor, a mentor at TechStars, and serves as an advisor to startups.