It would be lazy of me to call Plumbr‘s latest funding round another example of the ‘Skype mafia’ in action. But, already backed by former head of Skype Estonia, Sten Tamkivi, the Estonian startup is adding Skype co-founder Jaan Tallinn to its list of backers.
The company, which offers software to automatically detect the root causes of Java performance issues, thus potentially saving hundreds of hours of debugging, has picked up $700,000 in new funding.
The new capital will be used for further product development and to boost Plumbr’s marketing presence in the U.S., where I’m told the company does roughly half of its business, including opening an east coast office.
In addition to new backer Tallinn, the startup’s previous investors, who, alongside Tamkivi, include angel investor Matt Arnold and the founders of global mobile-payment firm Fortumo, also participated.
Founded in late 2011 off the back of a PhD research project, Plumbr initially offered a memory optimising tool to help predict and avoid Java-based software failures, but has since become a broader Java performance monitoring solution.
What makes its offering unique — or so the company claims — is its ability to “zoom in” to the root cause of Java performance issues thoroughly enough that it is able to highlight the exact lines of code or configuration that is causing the problem. That’s something that might otherwise require hours, if not days or weeks, of manual troubleshooting after an app has crashed.
Plumbr’s target customers are companies that run or develop business critical software systems, such as banks, e-commerce sites, and product development companies. It claims more than 100 customers globally, including NASA, NATO, Dell, HBO, Experian and EMC Corporation.