The performance of a mobile app can affect how customers perceive a brand. According to a questionnaire from Dimensional Research, sponsored by HP, 53% of app users who responded said they uninstalled a mobile app with issues like lag, while 37% said they hold an app responsible for performance issues.
Given the pace of development, good performance is not always easy to maintain. Looking for an automatable solution, four siblings – David, Daniil, Anna and Maria Liberman – co-founder Product science, a startup developing performance management software for apps. Product Science’s platform analyzes app code to find execution errors, with the goal of minimizing observable crashes, freezes, and errors.
“Every few years, phones get at least 50% faster, which skews our view, as we don’t notice how much our apps are deteriorating. But for long-tail users, their experience deteriorates significantly,” David and Daniil, who serve as Product Science co-CEOs, told businessroundups.org via email. eliminate people all over the world.”
The Liberman siblings have long been close. In 2005, Daniil and David founded Sibilant Interactive, which developed massively multiplayer RPG games. After Sibilant closed shop in 2008 due to illiquidity, David and Daniil – along with Anna and Maria – co-launched Concept Space, a provider of motion capture and CGI animation software. The brothers moved to the US a few years later to co-found fintech startup Frank.Money and AR company Kernel AR, which Snap acquired in October 2016 for an undisclosed sum.
At Snap, the Liberman siblings — including Anna and Maria — oversaw an animation studio and worked on Snapchat’s 3D Bitmoji feature, which allowed users to create full versions of their avatars. While at Snap, David and Daniil said they were also tasked with production activities, specifically fixing performance issues with Snap’s app for Android.
Product Science’s tool shows mobile app performance over time, plotted on a graph. Image Credits: Product science
Then the idea for Product Science was born. Together with Anna and Maria, David and Daniil launched the Libermans Companya holding company in which each sibling has a 25% interest, and Product Science started as a company under the holding company.
Through the Libermans Company, the siblings promised investors any projects they could start until 2051, allowing them to fund Product Science in the pre-seed stage. The Libermans Company includes all debts and assets the siblings might get, as well as profits; investors get an equal share of the wealth the siblings create, but have no say in how they distribute their time and effort.
“We realized that existing performance and observability tools were ineffective and decided to reinvent the application performance management industry,” said David and Daniil. “By replacing manual instrumentation and embedding it directly into the build processes, Product Science empowers anyone to identify causes of app performance issues.”
Product Science — which has raised $18 million in seed funding to date from the likes of Slow Ventures, Coatue, K5 Global, Mantis Ventures, Benchmark’s Peter Fenton, Insight Partners co-founder Jerry Murdock, and unnamed Snap VPs — analyzes pre production code using AI . The company’s tools and plug-ins for integrated development environments show video recordings of apps alongside performance tracks, providing insight into what’s happening behind the screen.
David and Daniil say one company, Saturn, used Product Science’s platform to reduce their app launch time from 4 seconds to 0.7 seconds. “Engineers can see their app’s video recording synchronized with the profile data recorded on any mobile device [using Product Science’s tools]the brothers added. “[They can] scrub through a video recording and dive into the code running behind the scenes.
Product Science counts Fortune 500 companies in industries such as social media, travel, e-commerce and banking as customers, though David and Daniil would not reveal how many customers the startup currently has. According to David and Daniil, annual recurring revenue exceeds $3 million, while Product Science – which was recently valued at $200 million, a source familiar with the matter tells businessroundups.org – wants to grow from 40 employees to about 100 by the end of the year.
“We realize the industry will slow down and want to make sure we are more flexible with our business offerings and can quickly grow the AI vision of the product,” said David and Daniil. “Product Science will use the money to drive its growth: we will distribute the capital raised equally between acquiring new customers, bringing in key employees and fine-tuning our proprietary AI algorithm.”
Image Credits: Product science
One of those refinements comes in the form of a new capability that suggests optimizations as engineers write code in their IDE of choice. The long-term vision is to train Product Science’s AI to automatically fix underperforming app code, David and Daniil said.
That continued differentiation will likely be key to Product Science’s success. After all, there are plenty of rivals in app performance monitoring, including platforms like Groundcover, ServiceNow (through the acquisition of Lightstep), Instabug, Sentry, Embrace, and even Cisco.
The app performance monitoring market was worth more than $5.9 billion by 2021, Through one estimate.
“There is both an opportunity and a challenge in the current environment,” added David and Daniil. “The challenge is that most software-as-a-service startups are experiencing longer sales cycles and enterprises are actively reducing spending; the opportunity for Product Science is that as users also reduce their spending, the tool becomes more and more a must-have for business-to-consumer companies as you can now solve your performance issues pre-production and retain and reduce customers churn significantly.”
