Accel leads seed round for Egyptian startup Instabug

Egypt-based Instabug, a provider of bug reporting tools, has raised $1.7 million in seed funding. Accel Partners led the round.

PRESS RELEASE

Instabug, an Egyptian startup part of Y Combinator’s recent Winter 2016 batch, today announces its $1.7 million seed round led by Accel Partners and other prominent angels including Amr Awadallah, co-founder of Cloudera, and Jim Payne, founder and CEO of MoPub. This is one of biggest venture capital funding rounds in Egypt and the Middle East.

The funding will help Instabug expand on its suite of bug reporting tools to provide a comprehensive support kit for mobile apps. Instabug also aims to grow its new San Francisco office.

Instabug launched in 2013 with a simple SDK to enable mobile users to report bugs in the apps they are using by shaking their phones. What makes Instabug unique is its ability to automatically attach screenshots, device details and user steps with each bug reported, to help drive a team’s development and QA. With over 20 million bugs reported already, Instabug has become the go-to solution for mobile bug reporting across 12,000 apps, including 26 of the top 100 apps in the App Store.

In February, Instabug launched Instabug 3.0 [1][2], offering in-app conversations to enable teams to have conversations with their users inside their apps. And in just 3 months, Instabug has tripled its global footprint from 100 million to almost 300 million iOS and Android devices.

With the new funding, Instabug aims to scale beyond bug reporting to offering full scale solutions to help mobile apps engage with both beta users and production users.

Omar Gabr, CEO and co-founder of Instabug, added “We’re excited about this round for many reasons. The Accel team are the exact investors we were looking for. Their experience in the mobile and developer tools industry is what we wanted to add to help us to grow the company. Moreover, there are many amazing startups in Egypt that haven’t gotten a chance to shine yet. We’re excited to draw the attention of Silicon Valley investors to Egypt, and help support the growing startup scene there.”

Accel Partners has been an active investor in developer tools and mobile infrastructure companies, with notable investments in MoPub, Segment, Dropbox, Sentry and Airwatch among others.

“Instabug is another example of how great startups can come from anywhere in the world, and we are looking forward to their becoming a key player in the fast growing mobile tools ecosystem”, Vas Natarajan and Rich Wong, Accel Partners.
Instabug was founded in 2012 by Omar Gabr and Moataz Soliman. Today, they’re a team of 17 and growing. They were part of the Egyptian accelerator Flat6Labs Cairo, and raised $300K from angel investors in 2013. Instabug joined YC’s Winter 2016 batch as the second Egyptian company ever in the accelerator. The company’s seed round represents one of biggest US-led venture capital rounds in an Egyptian startup.