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Egypt’s Instabug Raises $46 million Series B Round

May 18, 2022

Instabug, the foremost mobile monitoring, crash, and bug reporting tool for mobile teams, announced today a $46 million Series B investment round led by global software investor Insight Partners, with participation from current investor Accel and new investors Forgepoint Capital and Endeavor.

In 2021, Instabug reached more than 2.7 billion mobile devices, processed 110 billion mobile sessions, and 4.2 billion issues, and drove a significant increase in year-over-year bookings, adding enterprise leaders such as DoorDash, Verizon, IHG, ABInveb, Porsche, Qualtrics, Gojek, and others to its customer base.

Omar Gabr, CEO and co-founder of Instabug

The widely used bug, crash reporting, and performance monitoring solutions from Instabug are critical for mobile developers and organizations who place a high value on understanding the performance of their mobile apps and the user experiences they provide. With the new funding, Instabug will pursue its aim of providing engineering teams with performance data and issue visibility, as well as product teams with customer insights and direct user input. Instabug is developing the first mobile observability and performance monitoring platform by expanding on its existing proactive issue detection, sophisticated debugging, and alert management capabilities.

“Mobile applications and our interactions with them have been evolving for almost 15 years, but only in the past few have these interactions become the primary way we interface with brands and services all around us,” said Omar Gabr, CEO and co-founder of Instabug. “Leaders in industries spanning banking, transportation, retail, and education have realised mobile applications are the primary way customers will experience their brands and products. This new capital will help us develop more strategic partnerships with these enterprises as they increase investment in a mobile-first approach to customer engagement.”

Why The Investors Invested

“Today’s digital brands and services are increasingly demanding purpose-built mobile solutions that improve their products and experiences,” said Ganesh Bell, Managing Director at Insight Partners. “Instabug is strongly positioned to lead the nascent mobile app observability and monitoring space because the company has treated mobile as a first-class citizen since day one, and its leadership has a deep understanding of the needs faced by mobile-focused/mobile-first organisations and developers.”

“We are now at the point where mobile developers and teams can’t rely on server-side performance monitoring alone to understand and improve their app experience,” said Moataz Soliman, CTO and co-founder of Instabug. “Mobile developers have not had access to the level of observability, performance or user-level insights that web developers have historically had when developing and improving web-based applications. We strive to give mobile teams the visibility they have been missing and are furthering our efforts to become the standard for client-side performance monitoring and management, relied on by developers and leading digital enterprises alike.”

A Look At What The Startup Does

Instabug is a mobile monitoring, crash, and bug reporting solution for mobile teams founded in 2016 in Cairo by Omar Gabr and Moataz Soliman. It is intended to assist developers in better understanding the performance of their mobile applications and their impact on user experience.

Instabug claims to have reached over 2.7 billion mobile devices, processed 110 billion mobile sessions, and resolved 4.2 billion issues by 2021, and its clients include DoorDash, Porsche, and Gojek.

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Charles Rapulu Udoh

Charles Rapulu Udoh is a Lagos-based lawyer, who has several years of experience working in Africa’s burgeoning tech startup industry. He has closed multi-million dollar deals bordering on venture capital, private equity, intellectual property (trademark, patent or design, etc.), mergers and acquisitions, in countries such as in the Delaware, New York, UK, Singapore, British Virgin Islands, South Africa, Nigeria etc. He’s also a corporate governance and cross-border data privacy and tax expert.
As an award-winning writer and researcher, he is passionate about telling the African startup story, and is one of the continent’s pioneers in this regard. You can book a session and speak with him using the link: https://insightsbyexperts.com/view_expert/charles-rapulu-udoh

Egypt’s Debugging Software Startup Instabug Raises $5M In Series A Round Of Funding

May 5, 2020

As mobile usage across the world increases Instabug, the Cairo-based mobile phone debugging software startup has raised $5 million Series A round, once again led by former investor Accel.

Omar Gabr, co-founder and CEO of Instabug

“We’ve been working with Accel since 2016 and we’re very excited to continue our partnership. We grew 120% in revenues in the last 12 months, adding dozens of Enterprise customers. We’ve always been running a disciplined business, we’re almost profitable for some time now. This is what made our fundraising fast in the middle of all the current events. Our fundraising conversations with Accel started after the pandemic outbreak,” Omar Gabr, co-founder and CEO of Instabug, said in a statement.

Here Is All You Need To Know

Also participating in this round are angel investors including Amr Awadallah, co-founder of Cloudera, and Jim Payne, founder and CEO of MoPub, both of whom have invested previously.
Born during the chaotic era of the Arab Spring, Instabug managed to make it to TechCrunch Disrupt, then Y Combinator in 2016, then a $1.7 million in seed round led by Accel Partners. Originally, part of the Egyptian accelerator Flat6Labs Cairo, they raised $300,000 from angel investors in 2013.
Instabug plans to use the investment to accelerate their plans, double down on their vision, and grow even faster. With the funding, Instabug would be launching different new products in the next few months.
This investment brings the startup’s total funding to date to $7 million.

Why The Investors Invested

Previous investor Accel is known for investing in profitable, or nearly profitable companies.

“We seek to understand entrepreneurs as individuals, appreciate their originality and play to their strengths. Because greatness doesn’t have a stereotype. From the earliest days through all phases of growth, it’s our responsibility to support unique founders with unique insights as they take the seeds of promise and grow them into amazing, enduring companies,” the VC noted on its website.

According to General Partner at Accel, Rich Wong Instabug’s beginnings remind him “very much of the early days”.

“I just love the grit and the drive of Omar, Moataz and team to build something special from seemingly unlikely beginnings,” Wong said. “They didn’t grow up in an environment with hundreds of examples of startup success around them like you have here in Silicon Valley, and had to have the guts to do something truly different.”

*Startup Instabug has seen a major surge in usage caused by the pandemic*

Read also: Nigerian Healthtech Startup Helium Health Raises $7 Million From Dubai- based VC

A Look At What Startup Instabug Does

Cairo-based Instabug provides mobile developers with real-time insights throughout the app life cycle, with its bug and feedback reporting, secure crash reporting and in-app surveys. All the more important today, given that so many people are relying on apps during their pandemic lockdowns.

Instabug says that since the COVID-19 outbreak, it has seen a “massive surge” in usage, which has grown 45% since January. It’s also designed to streamline the communication between QA and developers, which is very relevant now, as many are working remotely.

Some 28 of the top 100 apps on the App Store use Instabug. Several competitors have been acquired, including Crashlytics (by Google) and HockeyApp (by Microsoft).

On whether the company is profitable, Omar said:

“I believe we’ve always been running a disciplined business and keeping an eye on our burn before it was mainstream. We’re almost profitable now, and our revenues are strong. And because of this, we didn’t need to raise that much over the years. Our competitors raised way more money than what we did to hit our revenue milestones. The first time we hit profitability was actually 9 months after we launched our pricing plans. We launched our first pricing plans in January 2015 and our revenues grew so fast that we became profitable by September of the same year.”

Charles Rapulu Udoh

Charles Rapulu Udoh is a Lagos-based lawyer who has advised startups across Africa on issues such as startup funding (Venture Capital, Debt financing, private equity, angel investing etc), taxation, strategies, etc. He also has special focus on the protection of business or brands’ intellectual property rights ( such as trademark, patent or design) across Africa and other foreign jurisdictions.
He is well versed on issues of ESG (sustainability), media and entertainment law, corporate finance and governance.
He is also an award-winning writer