I came across Instabug when I was in Cairo in 2013. Little did I know that this plucky startup, born in the Arab Spring, would eventually make it through Y Combinator’s Winter 2016 class.
Now they have gone on to raise $1.7M in a Seed round led by Accel Partners to expand beyond their original aim of mobile app bug reporting. Other prominent angel investors in the team include Amr Awadallah, co-founder of Cloudera, and Jim Payne, founder and CEO of MoPub.
Given that the startup still has most of its team back in Egypt, this is one of the bigger rounds in the MENA region. It also plans to grow its new San Francisco office.
Instabug intends now to expand its suite of bug reporting tools to create a broader kit supporting mobile apps.
Instabug’s simple SDK emerged in 2013 to allow mobile users to report bugs in apps simple by shaking their phones. Instabug cleverly then automatically attached screenshots, device details and user steps with each bug reported, aiding the developed. There are lots of competitors, too many to name. But Instabug allows developers to see bugs, feedback and crashes all together in one place.
It’s now reporting across 12,000 apps, including 26 of the top 100 apps in the App Store. It’s now present in almost 300 million iOS and Android devices, says the company.
In February, Instabug launched Instabug 3.0. This offered in-app conversations to enable teams to have conversations with their users inside their apps.
Omar Gabr, CEO and co-founder of Instabug, says “We’re excited to draw the attention of Silicon Valley investors to Egypt, and help support the growing startup scene there.”
Originally part of the Egyptian accelerator Flat6Labs Cairo, they raised $300K from angel investors in 2013.