Skype Co-Founder Jaan Tallinn Backs Reversible Debugging Startup Undo Software

As software continues to eat the world, the tools to help make developers’ lives easier continue to mature. Case in point: Cambridge, UK-based Undo Software, which offers reversible debugging software for app development on Linux and Android. Long thought of as one of the holy grails of software development, reversible debugging is the ability to run an application backwards as well as forwards to make it easier to track down those elusive software bugs.

Today the company is announcing a $1.25 million funding round from Skype co-founder Jaan Tallinn (who is a serial investor and most recently added to communication app Fleep’s seed round), along with existing backers within the Cambridge Angels group. I’m told it’s actually Undo Software’s third round of funding, although previous rounds — the last of which took place in April 2013 — remain undisclosed. That would suggest they were less than even this modest new funding.

Undo Software’s main product is UndoDB, which provides reversible debugging of Linux and Android software (and a host of other pretty technical features), enabling developers to record a program’s execution and then “rewind their code in real-time to find bugs more quickly, saving time and reducing cost.”

The pay-off, of course, is increased productivity and, ultimately, faster times to market for complex software. To that end, chip-maker ARM has integrated UndoDB software into its ARM DS-5 Professional Edition, the company’s flagship software development studio.

Undo Software cites two major competitors. Painstakingly reviewing code manually (duh!) or open source tools that support reversible debugging such as the GDB debugger. However, the startup claims that UndoDB’s performance is several orders of magnitude better than open source solutions, along with significantly improved memory consumption.