HeadSpin has closed a $20 million Series B, valuing the provider of mobile application performance software at $500 million. New investors ICONIQ Capital, Battery Ventures and EQT Ventures participated in the funding round, as well as existing backers GV, Telstra Ventures, Danhua Capital, Nexus Ventures Partners and NextWorld Capital.
The company emerged from stealth last year with Manish Lachwani at the helm. Lachwani was the former principal architect of the Amazon Kindle, chief technology officer of mobile gaming company Zynga and co-founder and chief technology officer of Google-acquired Appurify, which helped developers automate testing and optimization of their mobile apps and websites.
He’s been in the application performance management business for a long time; under his leadership, Palo Alto-based HeadSpin has quickly grown into one of the fastest growing, though relatively unknown, startups in Silicon Valley.
“What HeadSpin has been able to achieve in its first three years is remarkable, and it has
already attracted dozens of major clients across the mobile ecosystem,” ICONIQ partner Will Griffith said. “The company is quickly becoming the new standard of record for all mobile ecosystem players going forward. It’s one of the fastest-scaling software companies we’ve seen.”
HeadSpin works with Tinder, DocuSign and some 200 other app providers, allowing the companies to test and monitor their apps in real-time and on real devices before, during and after an app is released. The AI-enabled platform gives developers the ability to experience their app just as any regular user would and highlights high priority issues so companies can quickly resolve customer’s problems at scale.
Founded in 2015, HeadSpin says it expects to double revenue in 2018 but did not disclose any financial metrics.
Chief technology officer Brien Colwell is the other half of the company’s founding team. Colwell is the founder and former CEO of Nextop.io, a Y Combinator graduate and app optimization startup. Colwell and Lachwani are joined by HeadSpin’s head of product Sriram Krishnan, Tinder’s former head of international growth. Krishnan joined HeadSpin in January after working with HeadSpin’s toolset in his role at the app-based dating company.
“When I signed up for HeadSpin, I found out how phenomenal the product was,” Krishnan told TechCrunch.
“A lot of what we built was predicated on the fact that the mobile ecosystem is still very new,” he added. “If you think about the apps world, it’s only been around 10 years … It’s the Wild West out there when it comes to understanding performance.”
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