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Mobile app performance can influence how customers perceive a brand. According to an HP-sponsored Dimensional Research survey, 53% of app users who responded said they uninstalled a mobile app due to issues such as lag, while 37% attributed it to performance issues.
Given the speed of development, good performance is not always easy to maintain. Looking for an automated solution, four brothers – David, Daniel, Anna and Maria Lieberman – co-founded Product Science, a startup that develops performance management software for applications. A product science platform analyzes application code to find performance flaws, reducing potential crashes, freezes, and errors.
“Every couple of years, phones are at least 50% faster, and that’s what distorts our perspective because we don’t realize how much it’s degrading our apps. But for long-tail users, the experience has gotten significantly worse,” David and Daniel, co-CEOs of Product Science, told TechCrunch. “At Product Science, our mission is to eliminate delays caused by software inefficiencies for people around the world,” he said in an email.
The Lieberman siblings have been close for a long time. In the year In 2005, Daniel and David co-founded Sibilant Interactive, which developed multiplayer RPG games. In the year After Illegal Sibilant closed up shop in 2008, David and Daniel – along with Anna and Maria – co-founded motion capture and CGI animation software provider Concept Space. The brothers moved to the US a few years later to co-found fintech startup Frank.Money and AR company Kernel AR, which Snap bought for an undisclosed amount in October 2016.
At Snap, the Lieberman siblings — including Anna and Maria — took over the animation studio and worked on Snapchat’s 3D Bitmoji feature, which allows users to create full-bodied versions of their avatars. During their time at Snap, David and Daniel said they were tasked with manufacturing operations and specifically solving performance issues with Snap’s app for Android.
The Product Science tool shows the number of mobile apps deployed on a graph over time. Image Credits: Production science
That’s when they had the idea of product science. Together with Anna and Maria, David and Daniel, each sibling has a 25% stake in the Liebermans Company and started by establishing Product Science under the holding company.
At the Liebermans’ company, the siblings have promised investors all the projects they can launch until 2051, allowing them to understand product science at a pre-seed level. The Liebermans’ company includes any liabilities and assets the siblings may have, as well as profits. Investors get a proportional share of whatever wealth the siblings create, but they have no say in how they allocate their time and effort.
“We realized that existing performance and visibility tools were ineffective and decided to reinvent the application performance management industry,” said David and Daniel. “By replacing manual tools and embedding them right into build processes, production science allows anyone to identify application performance issues.”
Product Science — which raised $18 million in seed funding from backers including Slow Ventures, Coatwe, K5 Global, Mantis Ventures, Benchmark’s Peter Fenton, Insight Partners founder Jerry Murdoch and unnamed Snap VPs — uses AI to analyze pre-production code. . The company’s tools and plugins for integrated development environments display video footage of applications next to performance footprints, providing insights into what’s happening behind the screen.
One company, David & Daniel, used Saturn’s Product Science platform to reduce their app’s launch time from 4 seconds to 0.7 seconds. “Engineers can view their application video footage synced with recorded profile data on any mobile device. [using Product Science’s tools]” the brothers added. “[They can] Check out the video footage and dive into the code behind the scenes.
Product Science counts Fortune 500 companies in social media, travel, e-commerce and banking as clients, though David and Daniel wouldn’t say how many clients the startup currently has. Annual recurring revenue is north of $3 million, according to David and Daniel, product science — recently estimated at $200 million, a source familiar with the matter tells TechCrunch — It aims to grow from 40 employees to about 100 by the end of the year.
“We understand that the industry is shrinking and we want to make sure that we are more flexible with our company’s offerings and that we can quickly develop the AI vision of the product,” said David and Daniel. “Product Science will use the funding to fuel its growth: We will evenly split the capital raised between attracting new customers, securing key hires and refining our proprietary AI algorithm.”
Image Credits: Production science
One of these improvements comes in the form of a new ability that allows engineers to optimize when writing code in their IDE of choice. The long-term vision is to train Product Science AI to automatically fix underperforming app code, David and Daniel said.
That continued diversity may be the key to Product Science’s success. There are many competitors in the application performance monitoring space, including platforms such as Groundcover, ServiceNow (acquired by Lightstep), Instabug, Sentry, Embrace and even Cisco.
The application performance monitoring market will be worth more than $5.9 billion by 2021, according to one estimate.
“There is an opportunity and a challenge in the current situation,” added David and Daniel. “The challenge is that most software-as-a-service startups are experiencing longer sales cycles and enterprises are actively reducing their costs. The opportunity for product science is that as users also reduce their costs, the tool is becoming more important to business-to-consumer companies because they can now solve performance issues pre-production and retain customers.” And you can reduce it.
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