Product Science, which develops mobile app performance monitoring tools, lands $18M – TechCrunch
The performance of a mobile app can impact how customers perceive a brand. According to a survey from Dimensional Research sponsored by HP, 53% of app users who responded said they’ve uninstalled a mobile app with issues like lag, while 37% said that they hold an app responsible for performance problems.
Given the pace of development, good performance isn’t always easy to maintain. Searching for an automatable solution, four siblings — David, Daniil, Anna and Maria Liberman — co-founded Product Science, a startup that develops performance management software for apps. Product Science’s platform analyzes app code to find flaws in the execution, aiming to minimize perceptible crashes, freezes and errors.
“Every couple of years, phones are at least 50% faster, and that’s what distorts our view since we don’t notice how much our apps degrade. But for long-tail users, their experience worsens significantly,” David and Daniil, who serve as Product Science’s co-CEOs, told TechCrunch via email. “At Product Science, our mission is to eliminate delays caused by software inefficiency for people worldwide.”
The Liberman siblings have long been close. In 2005, Daniil and David co-founded Sibilant Interactive, which developed massively multiplayer RPG games. After Sibilant closed up shop in 2008 due to illiquidity, David and Daniil — together with Anna and Maria — co-launched Concept Space, a vendor for motion capture and CGI animation software. The brothers moved to the U.S. a few years later to co-found the fintech startup Frank.Money and AR firm Kernel AR, which Snap acquired for an undisclosed amount in October 2016.
At Snap, the Liberman siblings — including Anna and Maria — oversaw an animation studio and worked on Snapchat’s 3D Bitmoji feature, which let users create full-body versions of their avatars. While at Snap, David and Daniil said that they were tasked with production operations as well, specifically solving performance issues with Snap’s app for Android.
Product Science’s tool shows the performance of mobile apps over time, charted on a graph. Image Credits: Product Science
That’s when they had the idea for Product Science. Together with Anna and Maria, David and Daniil launched the Libermans Company, a holding company in which each sibling has a 25% stake, and started Product Science as a venture under the holding company.
Through the Libermans Company, the siblings pledged to investors all the projects they might start through 2051, allowing them to fund Product Science at the pre-seed stage. The Libermans Company includes any debts and assets the siblings might gain as well as profits; investors get a proportional share of whatever wealth the siblings create, but don’t have say over how they allocate their time and effort.
“We realized that existing performance and observability tools were ineffective and decided to reinvent the application performance management industry,” David and Daniil said. “By replacing manual instrumentation and embedding right into the build processes, …….
