Embrace.io raises $2.5M to track mobile app performance

Embrace.io says it can help developers understand the performance of their apps — and determine whether things like bugs or slow load times are actually driving users away.

The company just announced that it has raised $2.5 million in seed funding led by Eniac Ventures, with participation from The Chernin Group, Techstars Ventures, BoxGroup and others.

CEO Eric Futoran (pictured above with his co-founders Maggie Shih and Fredric Newberg) told me that existing mobile analytics products are built primarily for marketers. So if a developer wants to understand the technical reasons why people are leaving their app, they’re basically “blind to it,” he said, or they have to build their own “jury-rigged” products.

Futoran said he experienced this himself as a co-founder at mobile gaming company Scopely. If he wanted answers to these kinds of app performance questions, he said he’d “walk up to my lead engineer’s desk,” but the engineer would just “shrug and say there’s no way to reproduce the issue.”

So Embrace.io offers what Futoran said is “one unified tool” where developers can track all logged events and related timing and performance data, allowing them to get so granular that they can examine individual user sessions.

Embrace.io screenshot

Futoran also said the technology is very different from existing crash reporting services, because users can have a bad experience without any crash. In fact, Futoran said that his goal has been to “fix crash reporting.” The bigger vision, though, is “performance optimization,” where Embrace.io plays a more active role in helping developers constantly improve their apps.

“That’s why I love Scopely — I love tweaking things to make more money,” Futoran said. “It’s the best feedback loop.”

Angel investors include Scopely co-founder and CEO Walter Driver, Scribd and Parse co-founder Tikhon Bernstam and the founders of Burstly/Testflight.

Embrace.io has been available to a few select customers and is launching more broadly today.