Today, we’re excited to announce the public launch of Specto - the next generation platform for application performance monitoring that’s actually built for the age of mobile. We co-led the $3.25 million seed investment (with Susa Ventures and Bain Ventures, SVAngel and Liquid2 along with a select group of angel investors) in Specto because we were so impressed with the founders’ insights into what’s needed in this space.
As developers themselves, Specto founders Jernej Strasner and Indragie Karunaratne have utilized their share of performance management tools over the years. They saw the opportunity to go beyond focusing on server performance and deliver functionality that enables developers to stay competitive with user expectations. Starting with the premise that a “working” app isn’t nearly good enough, they’ve created the performance solution they themselves wanted to use as developers.
Specto collects data at an unprecedented level of granularity and provides insights that are not possible using traditional tools. It runs in production — on real end-user devices so there is no wasted time reproducing the issue or bug. Specto doesn’t just deliver a better mobile solution, it actually scales with its customers. It’s no wonder top mobile apps - including Notion and Rapha - are already on board.
Making this technology available to the top mobile consumer apps is a massive opportunity - one we’re excited to see Specto launch into. Consumers spend more time on mobile than ever before - accessing essential services like banking, transportation, and now even healthcare through their mobile devices. They expect speed and seamless use from every app they use (every time). In 2021, it’s expected that mobile app downloads will reach 258 billion. Users spend on average 3h 40m per day on mobile, over 90% of that time is spent in a mobile app while just 10% is spent in a web browser (source: App Annie State of Mobile 2020). The days of web-based APMs are numbered. Consumers increasingly have zero patience for apps that aren’t instantly responsive. And the developers building those apps know this - poor performance could translate to millions (or even billions) in lost revenue.
As early movers in the app performance space, Jernej and Indragie both helped build application performance monitoring tooling during their time at Facebook. These tools were used across billions of downloads, and across multiple geographies and device types (Android and iOS). This isn’t the first time we’ve invested in founding teams who’ve built developer tools inside larger consumer organizations. Pagerduty, Mesosphere, CoreOS, and other teams in our portfolio put in time as operators - building tools for their own teams desperately needed - before spinning out on their own and making similar tools more broadly available. We believe strongly in the thesis that today’s team members are tomorrow’s founders - and we’re thrilled to see Specto launch broadly after two years of hard work building.