Cambridge, UK-based software debugging startup Undo has closed a $14 million Series B financing round, with the capital to be used to grow its software development team.
Grow being the appropriate word for a company that received its 2012 seed funding when operating out of a garden shed; it now services global clients like SAP and Micro Focus, amongst others.
Undo, which first received external funding in 2012, was set up by experienced entrepreneur and coder Greg Law and Julian Smith, who developed the tool on evenings and weekends at the end of Law’s garden, after running out of patience with available commercial and open source solutions to debug software.
Diagnosis: Uplifting
Undo’s program execution capture and replay technology allows vendors of complex Linux applications to diagnose severe software failures in test or in production, and fix critical bugs that are impossible to reproduce (and therefore fix) by any other means.
It currently supports C/C++ applications. The company plans to use part of the funding to expand its language support to include Java, Python and others.
Greg Law, Undo’s CEO and co-founder, said: “When an application crashes at a customer site, it is often impossible to obtain a complete picture of what happened.”
“Yet software engineers need to know exactly what blew up where if they are going to fix the issue. Instead of a development team flailing around with unhelpful log files and core dumps, leaving clients irate whilst they are waiting for a vital fix, engineers can capture critical production failures ‘in the act’ in the form of a recording, turning failures into 100% reproducible events. The recording can then be analysed using Undo’s reverse-debugger either at the customer site or back at base.”
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The Undo Engine performs a JIT (just-in-time) binary translation of application machine code as it executes, which allows it to capture all sources of non-determinism such as system calls, signals, thread switches and reads from shared memory or device maps.
New investors include Global Brain Corporation, a Japanese venture capital fund, and Parkwalk Advisors Ltd which invests in innovative UK technology companies.
All existing investor groups participated in the round, including Rockspring, Martlet, Sir Peter Michael (founder of Quantel, Classic FM and California’s Peter Michael Winery), the Cambridge Angels group and Jaan Tallinn (co-founder of Skype and Kazaa).
Victor Christou, CEO of CIC adds: “Undo is typical of the sort of business in which CIC invests. It has innovative technology, which addresses the challenges brought about by the problem of software accountability. Undo has built a commercially applicable solution to a real market need and is a testament to the high calibre of businesses that are flourishing in the Cambridge cluster. We are very pleased with the progress Undo has made since we first invested in 2015 and are delighted to continue to support the business as it gains further commercial traction.”
