Crashlytics, a Cambridge-based startup that helps developers understand how and why their mobile apps crashed, is taking another slug of funding with a $5 million round led by Flybridge and Baseline Ventures. The company’s co-founder Wayne Chang said the company decided to take funding after its $1 million seed round was oversubscribed. (This round was also oversubscribed.)
“We liked the investors that we were working with,” Chang said. “Obviously, we liked the valuation and the terms of this round, too.”
Crashlytics provides developers with an online dashboard that helps explain where mobile app crashes might come from. It details the device’s state at the time of crash (software version, orientation, model, etc.) and even shows developers the exact line of code that the app crashed on.
Chang says that’s a big step up from what Apple provides. Usually if an iOS app crashes, the user deletes the app or leaves a bad review. Chang says that Apple’s own crash reporting system might take a few weeks to reveal what’s going wrong.
The company has some early momentum to show. Chang says that more than 500 organizations are using Crashlytics and that the company’s SDK is on tens of millions of devices.
He touts an enviable list of clients like Path, Hipstamatic, Highlight, Yammer, Box and SoundCloud among dozens of others. A point of pride for Chang is that Crashlytics SDK is very small — think 40 kilobytes. So that should help prevent developers from running up against app size limits in the iOS or Android app stores.
But the big picture isn’t just crash reporting, as you might guess. Crash reporting is a start.
“Our end goal with Crashlytics isn’t do to crash reporting,” Chang said. “We want to be best service for that and then quickly move beyond that to address other developer needs.”
P.S. You may know Crashlytics from controversies such as the debate over how to replace UDIDs on iOS devices. The company came in with its own solution called SecureUDID, that gives developers an identification scheme that won’t violate Apple’s new policies. Apple is deprecating an older identification scheme called UDIDs amid privacy concerns.