Launching out of Y Combinator’s Winter 2016 class today is a company I interviewed way back in 2013 in Startup Alley. Incredibly, Instabug startup started building the app during the turmoil in Egypt back in 2012 and made it out of the chaos of the Egyptian revolution to make it to, and through, YC. That’s True Grit.
Today, they’re going out of beta and are launching their biggest product update since they launched, Instabug 3.0.
Instabug is tacking mobile software bugs. With thousands of apps released every single day, the competition is tough, and apps with bugs will never get those coveted 5 star reviews. It helps app developers fix bugs before even submitting their apps to the store, while still engaging their users after the app is launched. They claim they can thus cutting the number of negative reviews by 80%.
Users can report bugs, send feedback and ask questions by just shaking their phones, without the need to leave the app. They can also attach screenshots, images and voice notes. Instabug then captures the steps to reproduce the problem and all other device details so that developers can fix the bug faster.
The developers or support team can reply back and have a live two-way conversation with the user inside the app. So no more attaching screenshots in emails or tweeting the company for support.
Instabug still works out of Egypt and under its belt has 12,000 apps running on over 100 million devices and with 10 million bugs already reported. They say they are currently processing over 35,000 bugs/day.
Instabug was founded back in 2012, during the turmoil that was going on in Egypt, by Omar Gabr and Moataz Soliman. They have raised a $300K seed round from George Harik (7th employee at Google and Advisor to Google Ventures), Amr Awadallah (Founder and CTO at Cloudera) and other investors from the Middle East.
This team of 17 engineers was the second Egyptian company ever to join YC.