When mobile developers create apps, they push them out into the world, and problems inevitably arise that engineers must strive to fix. Mobile.dev, a new startup from a former Uber engineer, wants to turn this story around and catch bugs before the app launches. Today, the company emerged from the cover with a beta of its solution and a $ 3 million seed investment led by Cowboy Ventures with the participation of several technology luminaries.
While at Uber, Leland Takamine, the company’s CEO and co-founder, says he observed this workflow where an app was released to the world, a company set up tools to monitor the app, and then worked to fix the problem when users reported problems or the monitoring software picked them up. At Uber, they started building tools to try to spot problems before production.
When he started mobile.dev with COO Jacob Krupski, the goal was to build something like this, but for every company regardless of size. “What we realized was that anything we could do to fix issues before an app was released was 100 times more valuable than anything you can monitor in production,” Takamine told me.
And that’s exactly what the company wants to achieve. ”Our mission at mobile.dev at a high level is to enable companies to provide high-quality mobile applications. And more specifically, stop sacrificing users and start realizing problems before you post them, ”he said.
He says that when he talks to app developers about such a solution, they are intrigued because, as he says, “it’s really a simple question,” but unless you’re the size of a company like Uber and the huge technical resources that are out there. For the average company or individual developer, such a solution was not yet available. And it was this deep technical know-how that he built up at Uber that laid the foundation for what they are building at mobile.dev.
The two founders launched the company a year ago and are working with design partners and first customers, especially Reddit. The product goes into beta today. At the moment they are the only two employees, but that will change with the new capital as they look for more talented engineers.
With very specific skills required to develop such a solution it becomes even more difficult to hire different people, but Takamine says the goal is to build a diverse team. “I think it makes sure we look beyond our immediate network and make sure we’re looking at different sources,” he said.
The company established during the pandemic with just the two founders involved has been completely removed so far and they intend to keep doing so when hiring new employees in the months ahead.
“We will be working entirely remotely, I think we have a big advantage in that we start remotely and it is much more difficult to move from an office to a remote location. So we’re starting with the first principles and building our culture around remote work, ”he said.