Last week Maxfield Capital, a Moscow-based $100 million venture fund, and Altair, the investment vehicle of serial business angel Igor Ryabenkiy, announced a seed-stage investment in Qbaka, an award-winning startup developing a solution to track JavaScript errors on web services. The round amounted to $200,000, but may be completed with other investors, Qbaka’s co-founder Andrey Mima told East-West Digital News.
Qbaka helps developers track client-side problems. It provides automated monitoring and real-time analysis of errors, without any user intervention.
“Errors in interactive user interfaces are often a cause of loss of clients and money for a company. Now by just adding one bloc of code to their website, the IT team is notified automatically in case of errors. They may instantly visualize all errors using the Qbaka dashboard, which allows them to determine the problem and fix it,” the company stated.
Qbaka claims that its solution is used by more than 1,000 developers from 450 companies, including large online stores, online dating services, social and entertainment websites and analytics and data storage tools among others. About one fifth of these companies have signed up for a paid version of the service to track an unlimited number of errors.
No more than 30% of the startup’s customers come from Russia. Others come form virtually anywhere in the world, including North America and Western Europe. The startup intends to launch a massive marketing campaign in these regions by the end of 2013.
Launched in June 2012 by web programmers from St. Petersburg, Qbaka has won several industry awards. These include the first prize at Web Ready 2013, a Russian innovation contest, and the “Top JavaScript Innovator” award at the San Francisco Developer Week Conference 2013. The startup received a pre-seed investment from startup accelerator Startup Monthly and has been selected by US startup accelerator Mass Challenge, said Mima, who has spent most of his time this year in Silicon Valley.
“I met and appreciated the team one year ago. They have a clear product which saves a lot of time for developers and allows them to deliver a better user experience,” Igor Ryabenkiy said in an exchange with East-West Digital News. “I offered them my support at that time, but they preferred to continue working on their own until they received their first customers.”
Ryabenkiy’s latest investments went to Moscow mobile commerce platform Goodwin and geolocated job search app Qwenty.
The Maxfield Capital fund was created in May 2013 by former Skolkovo top executive Alexander Turkot and backed by Russian oligarch and Skolkovo president Viktor Vekselberg, among other LPs. Focusing on investment in IT and early-stage Internet projects, the fund recently invested approximately $1 million in Jelastic, a Russian-American startup developing a hosting platform for Java application developers.
The original version of this story erroneously indicated that Qbaka secured $600,000. The startup is actually seeking to raise this amount, but has raised only $200,000 to date.
