Cambridge-based Undo lands $14m to develop debugging tech

Debugging software company Undo has closed a $14m (£10.63m) Series B round.

The round was led by Cambridge Innovation Capital (CIC), a company builder which focuses on technology and healthcare.

New investors Global Brain Corporation – a Japanese venture capital fund – and Parkwalk Advisors also contributed to the round, alongside existing investors.

Undo was founded in 2005 by Greg Law and Julian Smith, and it then went on to score its first external capital investment in 2012.

CEO Greg Law said the money will allow the company to scale its commercial and customer success capacity. It will also be used to grow Undo’s software development team, accelerate its product development and expand its US operations.

Law continued: “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.” 

Undo has developed software technology which diagnoses severe software failures in test or in production and fix critical bugs that they say are impossible to detect by any other means. In this way, the bugs can be caught before they cause too much trouble in production.

“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,” he added.

The technology can be used with C/C++ applications. This funding will be used to add Java, Python, among others, to the platform.

Greg Law explained: “The world is entering a new era where software is beginning to make decisions that underpin our lives, our livelihoods, and even western democracy itself; software accountability is fast becoming a very big problem, now recognised by software companies, the major economic players, and governments.”

Victor Christou, CEO of CIC added: “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.”

Whilst its HQ is in Cambridge, Undo has an office in San Francisco.

Undo’s technology is used by software companies including SAP, Micro Focus and Mentor Graphics.