Crittercism said Tuesday it raised a round of funding from Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, Google Ventures, Opus Capital, Shasta Ventures, and AOL Ventures. The San Francisco startup has developed a platform for diagnosing problems with mobile apps. Financial terms were not disclosed.
PRESS RELEASE
Crittercism Attracts Top VCs for Mobile Support Infrastructure
SAN FRANCISCO – July 12, 2011 – Crittercism today announced it raised funding from Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, Google Ventures, Opus Capital, Shasta Ventures, and AOL Ventures at the 4th annual MobileBeat Conference.
Crittercism has created a support platform that allows developers to immediately diagnose mobile app crashes and provide customer support to users. The company’s iOS library, which has been in beta, is now available to all mobile application developers. The iOS beta version has had over one million installs since it was released in January of this year. Crittercism also announced today that the Android SDK is available for limited release.
“Mobile app users had no recourse when an app crashed or misbehaved, and were left with no other option than to leave a bad review in the App Store. Crittercism gives a voice to an app’s user, keeps them engaged, and provides tools for a developer to diagnose, fix, and communicate the issue back to its users.” said Andrew Levy, co-founder and CEO of Crittercism. “We bring customer support into mobile applications enabling developers to maintain a high degree of customer satisfaction and greater engagement with their users.
” As application platforms and the devices on which apps can live proliferate, troubleshooting errors and supporting users becomes an increasingly critical issue that sucks up precious development time and resources.
Crittercism provides a library that plugs into any application and connects to a SAAS (Software as a Service) platform for application monitoring and support. The offering prioritizes critical bugs occurring on devices in the wild, and creates a direct communication channel between mobile companies and their users. The service gathers hardware and software diagnostic data in an attempt to recreate the state of the device upon a point of failure.
Crittercism has a unique opportunity to help application developers increase ratings and drive sales. Developers are able to notify users when an issue has been fixed, and specifically target users that ceased to use the application as a result of a crash or bug in the software. The company was previously part of the AngelPad accelerator program, and raised funding shortly after its demo day in March. A group of domestic and international investors also participated in the seed round, including early Facebook engineer Lucas Nealson. The investments will allow Crittercism to expand its service across other platforms. More information can be found at www.crittercism.com.
About Crittercism: Crittercism (www.crittercism.com) is support infrastructure for mobile apps. The company’s platform is focused on helping mobile application companies create more engaging and commercially successful applications by providing them the tools and frameworks for debugging and communicating with their users. Crittercism makes good apps great.
About Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers: Since its founding in 1972, Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers has backed entrepreneurs in over 600 ventures, including Amazon, Amyris, Bloom Energy, Electronic Arts, Genentech, Google, Intuit, Netscape, Sun, Symantec, and Zynga. KPCB portfolio companies employ more than 250,000 people. More than 150 of the firm’s portfolio companies have gone public. Many other ventures have achieved success through mergers and acquisitions.
About Google Ventures Google Ventures is the venture capital arm of Google Inc. We seek to discover and help develop great companies, and believe in the power of entrepreneurs to do amazing things. Our investments range from seed to late stage, across a broad range of industries, including consumer Internet, digital media, software, hardware, and biotechnology. We embrace the challenge of helping young companies grow from the proverbial garage to global relevance. For more information, visit www.googleventures.com.
About Opus Capital Opus Capital is an early-stage venture capital firm with more than $1 billion of committed capital under management, investing in committed, high integrity entrepreneurs building market-leading technology companies. The team has participated in the successful outcomes of more than 80 companies (including 50 IPOs) in the US and Israel including Adaptec, AirGate PCS, BlueNile, Brocade, Ciena, DoubleClick, Electronics for Imaging, FedEx, Genesys, Harmonic, Informatica, Kidaro and Vantive. Opus Capital is headquartered on Sand Hill Road in Menlo Park, California. For more information, visit www.opuscapital.com.
About Shasta Ventures Shasta Ventures is an early-stage investment firm focused on companies in the consumer Internet, mobile and software sectors. Shasta was formed to back brilliant entrepreneurs with an unwavering commitment to the customer experience. The firm is based in Menlo Park, California. For more information, go to www.shastaventures.com, or follow us on Twitter at @shastavc. About AOL Ventures AOL Ventures is the venture capital arm of AOL, focused on early stage investing in technology-centric consumer Internet companies. http://corp.aol.com/products-services/aol-ventures
About AngelPad AngelPad is a startup incubator based in San Francisco. Founded in 2010 by a team of ex-Googlers, AngelPad helps web- technology startups build better products, attract additional funding and ultimately grow more successful businesses.http://angelpad.org
