{"id":422,"date":"2018-07-16T11:47:44","date_gmt":"2018-07-16T11:47:44","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/signalnonoise.com\/?p=422"},"modified":"2018-07-16T11:47:44","modified_gmt":"2018-07-16T11:47:44","slug":"undo-gets-14m-to-scale-to-meet-the-software-accountability-challenge","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/signalnonoise.com\/?p=422","title":{"rendered":"Undo gets $14M to scale to meet the software accountability challenge"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Undo<\/a>, a long time player in the\u00a0debugging tools space, offering its program execution capture and replay technology to help others diagnose software failures, has closed a $14 million Series B round led by Cambridge Innovation Capital<\/a>, the Cambridge, UK-based builder of tech and healthcare companies.<\/p>\n

The 2005 founded startup \u2014 initially bootstrapped (out of founder Greg Law\u2019s garden shed) \u2014 has come a long way, and now has more than 30 paying customers for what it describes as its \u201crecord, rewind and replay\u201d debugging technology, including the likes of SAP HANA, Mentor Graphics, Cadence and Micro Focus.<\/p>\n

A quick potted history: In 2012, Law quit his job to go full time on Undo,<\/a> raising a small amount of angel funding and then a $1.25M from seed investment in 2014, followed by $3.3M in a series A funding in 2016.<\/p>\n

New investors in the Series B round include Global Brain Corporation, a Japanese venture capital fund; and UK-focused Parkwalk Advisors, while all Undo\u2019s existing investor groups also participated \u2014\u00a0 including Rockspring; Martlet; Sir Peter Michael (founder of Quantel, Classic FM and California\u2019s Peter Michael Winery); the Cambridge Angels group and Jaan Tallinn (co-founder of Skype and Kazaa).<\/p>\n

The Series B will be used to expand Undo\u2019s software development team, accelerate product development and grow its US operations. Undo says its best markets so far are electronic design automation (EDA); database manufacturers\/data management; and networking.<\/p>\n

\u201cThis funding will be used to significantly improve performance as part of Undo\u2019s\u00a0always-on recording<\/em>\u00a0vision, and also to accelerate our product roadmap and broaden the technology beyond compiled code so that it can be used with Java and other VM-based languages,\u201d it tells us.<\/p>\n

\u201cOur main competitor is the status quo \u2014 engineering organisations that do not evolve with the times. Old-school debugging techniques (e.g. printf, logging, core dump analysis) have been around for decades. 2000 was all about static analysis. 2010 was about dynamic analysis, 2020 will be about capturing software failures \u2018in the act\u2019 through capture & replay technology.\u201d<\/p>\n

Undo argues that its Live Recorder technology offers \u201ca completely new way of diagnosing software failures during development and in production\u201d \u2014 arguing that its approach is superior to traditional debugging techniques such as printf, logging, core dump analysis which are \u201cgeneral purpose and provide limited information\u201d, while it says static and dynamic analysis \u201care deep but can only look at specific instances of bugs\u201d \u2014 whereas it claims its tech \u201ccan capture failure instances across the whole spectrum and therefore plugs in the gaps which no-one else has filled yet\u201d.<\/p>\n

The UK company also sees a growing opportunity for its approach given increasingly complex and increasingly autonomous software risks becoming unaccountable, if it\u2019s making decisions without people knowing how and why. So the\u00a0wider vision for Undo is not just getting faster at fixing bugs but addressing the growing need for software makers to be able to articulate \u2014 and account for \u2014 what their programs are doing at any given moment.<\/p>\n

\u201cLonger term it\u2019s about that journey towards software accountability,\u201d says Law<\/a>. \u201cSoftware accountability is quite a broad thing \u2014 it really means the ability to be able to know for sure what some software did as it ran. And today that\u2019s all about the programmer\u2019s understanding of what their program has done. But actually it\u2019s far more than just programmers that need to understand software \u2014 and particularly as we move into this second chapter of the information revolution where computers are beginning to make decisions that affect our lives and our livelihoods. I mean in the case of social media and Facebook and things, Western democracy! The ability to have that accountability behind software actions is going to become a really important thing. That\u2019s a progressive journey that we\u2019re on.<\/p>\n

\u201cSo the question is what did the software actually do? And as we grow, and as time goes on, we\u2019ll answer that question in progressively bigger and bigger contexts.\u201d<\/p>\n

Source: Werzit – Local – Space – Cyber<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Undo, a long time player in the\u00a0debugging tools space, offering its program execution capture and replay technology to help others diagnose software failures, has closed a $14 million Series B round led by Cambridge Innovation Capital, the Cambridge, UK-based builder of tech and healthcare companies. The 2005 founded startup \u2014 initially bootstrapped (out of founder […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"false","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[42],"class_list":["post-422","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-attack"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/signalnonoise.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/422","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/signalnonoise.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/signalnonoise.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/signalnonoise.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/signalnonoise.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=422"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/signalnonoise.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/422\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/signalnonoise.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=422"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/signalnonoise.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=422"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/signalnonoise.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=422"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}