Undo announces $2m investment to accelerate growth of software debugging leader

New investors Cambridge Innovation Capital and entrepreneur Sir Peter Michael join Skype co-founder Jaan Tallinn and other existing backers

Cambridge, UK, 21 April 2015, Advanced debugging tools provider Undo today announced a fourth funding round of $2m, which will be used to expand the company’s product portfolio, staff numbers, and commercial teams.

The funding comes from a combination of new and existing investors. Cambridge Innovation Capital (CIC), and Sir Peter Michael, the founder of Quantel, Classic FM and California’s Peter Michael Winery, join existing backers of the company. Current investors include Jaan Tallinn, one of the original founders of Skype and Kazaa, and backers from within the Cambridge Angels group. The oversubscribed round closed in April 2015.

Undo’s tools enable software companies to dramatically improve debugging, therefore increasing productivity and customer satisfaction. In January 2015 Undo launched LiveRecorder, which enables developers to debug exact copies of customer problems, without needing to reproduce them in-house. It joins the UndoDB Linux and Android reversible debugging tool in the company’s portfolio. UndoDB enables developers to record, rewind and replay their code to quickly find critical bugs, increase productivity, and meet development deadlines.

(Cambridge Innovation Capital provides long-term growth funding for life science and technology companies in the Cambridge Cluste)

The last twelve months have seen significant expansion for Undo. As well as LiveRecorder, it launched UndoDB Out-and-About, a new way of licensing its software, doubled staff headcount, sold and deployed to some of the world’s biggest software vendors including Cadence Design Systems and Mentor Graphics, and was recognised by Gartner as a “Cool Vendor in Application Development” for 2014.

The new investment is being used to bring in world-class talent to strengthen the Undo team, with Elan Tanzer and Michael Whittingham joining as Vice President of Marketing and Vice President of Global Sales respectively. With over 20 years’ experience in the software industry, including roles at ARM and Global Graphics, Elan will be responsible for helping Undo develop and implement overall marketing strategy and execution, directly engage and manage the marketing team, and translate the company’s business objectives into marketing strategies that drive revenue.

Michael comes to Undo from Canonical, the company behind Ubuntu, the fastest growing Linux operating system for enterprise computing, where he was responsible for global business development within the ARM ecosystem. Prior to this he worked at Symbian Ltd where he built its global partnering and alliances organisation, driving strategic relationships and delivering licensing revenue with some of the major names in the phone industry.

Greg Law, CEO and co-founder, Undo said,

Undo has seen tremendous growth over the last year, as we have expanded our product portfolio and signed new customers internationally. The building blocks are in place and our new funding will enable us to accelerate our expansion, targeting the very fast-growing market for advanced software development tools for Linux and Android through a wider product range, greater development resources and increased focus on sales.

About Undo

Undo is the leading commercial supplier of Linux and Android reversible debugging tools that enable software developers to record, rewind and replay their C/C++ code to respond quickly to customer critical bugs, increase their productivity and meet their development deadlines. Used by over 1,000 developers at customers that include Cadence Design Systems and Mentor Graphics to solve complex, real-world problems, Undo’s family of tools is proven to reduce debugging time from weeks to minutes, while seamlessly integrating into existing development environments.

Undo Software is a privately held company headquartered in Cambridge and has recently been awarded the 2014 Disruptive Technology Award by Business Weekly. For more information, see https://undo.io/ or follow us on Twitter.

For more information
Chris Measures
Measures Consulting
+44 7976 535147
[email protected]

[1] Research by the University of Cambridge Judge Business School showed that 49.9% of a developer’s time is spent debugging at a wages cost of US$156bn a year (based on a proportion of the global cost of software development).