Thursday, October 13, 2011

Crashlytics details backers in recent $1M round

By Rodney H. Brown

Crashlytics Inc., a Cambridge-based mobile device application startup, has officially announced the $1 million funding that was filed with the SEC in July, and identified the investors involved in the seed funding round.

According to a press release, involved in the company’s first institutional round were investment firms Flybridge Capital Partners and Baseline Ventures, which co-led the round. Angel investors participating in Crashlytics’ funding include David Chang, COO at Where, a PayPal company; Lars Albright, co-founder of Quattro, now Apple iAds; Chris Sheehan, managing partner at CommonAngels; Ty Danco, founder of eSecLending and FX Aligned; Jennifer Lum, former vice president at Quattro; Roy Rodenstein, founder of Going.com; and Joe Caruso, managing partner at Bantam Group and founder of the currently ongoing series BREW Boston, as well as others.

Crashlytics was co-founded in 2010 by Jeff Seibert and Wayne Chang. Seibert was the engineering manager of Box.net, a Palo Alto, Calif.-based provider of web-based storage and collaboration services that established a research and development unit in Cambridge’s Central Square earlier this year. Serial entrepreneur and angel investor Chang serves as president of Crashlytics. He is an investor in New York-based iPad publishing software maker OnSwipe, which began its life in Boston as PadPressed. More recently, Chang filed a legal claim stating that Cameron Winklevoss and Tyler Winklevoss owe him a piece of their $65 million settlement from Facebook. In the suit, Chang said he worked on the ConnectU site, developed by the Winklevosses and Divya Narendra, which is at the core of their dispute with Zuckerberg.

Chang founded i2hub, a file sharing company, in 2004 and is a mentor at TechStars.

According to the release, Crashlytics’ technology provides developers with detailed diagnostics about issues related to crashes of mobile apps, securely and in real-time, including “the exact line number of code that the app crashed on.” The technology only works on iOS devices from Apple Inc. right now but Android support is coming soon, officials said in the release. The company is located at One Broadway in Cambridge.