Embrace Closes Funding Round to Transform How Engineering Teams Build Better, Bolder Mobile Experiences

Mobile experience engineering solution raises over $20 million in growth financing, increases customer base 130% Y-o-Y, and expands key leadership to accelerate growth.

Embrace, the solution to help engineers build better mobile experiences, is sharing its continued success in driving mobile transformation alongside an announcement of an upround of $20 million in growth financing. The inside round, a show of wholehearted support from all prior lead investors, was led by NEA with participation from Greycroft, AV8 (Allianz), and Eniac.

The new funding is dedicated to powering continued product innovation to help mobile teams build the best mobile experiences, buttressed by the launch of Embrace’s innovative new brand focused on the “builders” of mobile experiences consumers love.

“Embrace has an impressive client roster, including companies like Discover, Marriott, and The New York Times, reflecting how invaluable they’ve become for the mobile success of the biggest brands in the world,” said Aaron Jacobson, Partner at NEA. “Usage of mobile apps is growing rapidly, and a massive part of the market segment is still operating on legacy tools. There’s a huge gap between what providers in the Observability space are delivering, and what mobile engineers want and need to really delight their users.”

Companies Making Mobile a Priority

Consumers spent a record $33.9 billion conducting purchases in mobile apps in Q1 2023 alone. Beyond mobile apps, a massive amount of spend and innovation now occur on point-of-sale systems (tablets), workforce productivity devices, automotive telemetry and infotainment, and the spatial computing devices recently released by Apple. With these accelerative factors, the everyday focus of consumers is squarely on mobile, and the pressure on mobile teams to build creative, reliable, and performant experiences has never been greater.

Mobile is all about the details, and Embrace’s mobile experience engineering solution helps get them right. Embrace gives mobile teams, especially their engineers, a unique insight into all the variables, across hardware, software, networks, and UX, that shape each and every end-user’s mobile experiences. This level of insight empowers teams to identify and prioritize the user impact of any issue; this level of detail empowers engineers to instantly resolve issues; this level of understanding shifts a team’s focus from reactive bug solving to surfacing the highest ROI opportunities to improve performance.

Embrace has grown its customer base 130% year-over-year. With 93% quarterly logo retention, the company has secured a roster of clients invested in the value Embrace delivers. Embrace counts Discover, Marriott, The New York Times, Yum Brands (Taco Bell), Yahoo!, and other premier brands as clients in addition to top mobile-native businesses like Cameo, GOAT, Hatch, Ibotta, and Wildlife Games.

Marketing Technology News: MarTech Interview with Denise Vu Broady, CMO at Collibra

Mobile Engineer Insights

Dom Scandinaro, SVP of Engineering & Data, Cameo
“Sitting at the intersection of mobile technology and pop culture, Cameo must consistently move at lightning speed. Embrace has fundamentally changed how we manage our mobile app so we can quickly identify issues and in turn continue to create flawless, personalized fan experiences.”

Chris To, VP of Technology at GOAT
“Before we deploy a new release to every user, we check Embrace to see the impact of any issues that may arise. We remained 99.99% crash-free during a record traffic period, and we were able to focus on making the experience flawless for our very dedicated users.”

Chris Lavender, Vice President of Software Engineering at Hatch
“Embrace helps our team ensure that our app experience is as simple and soothing as our real-world products. As a company dedicated to rest and wellbeing, it’s crucial that the mobile experience we provide is smooth, calming, and easily connects users to their dream machine devices. Embrace gives us the insights and confidence to continually deliver on this promise.”

Team Leadership Expansion

Embrace has more than doubled its employee headcount in 18 months, making key hires in product and engineering.

Notably, Embrace added Andrew Tunall as VP & Head of Product. Tunall, previously VP Product at New Relic where he led Observability, is focused on innovating on data-driven tools for engineers to proactively optimize mobile experiences.

“A lot of monitoring and observability tools are fire alarms and insurance. They tell you when things are on fire, and engineers hope they don’t have to use them. We see adoption of Embrace by mobile engineers is around 8x that of tools built for Ops,” said Andrew Tunall, Head of Product at Embrace. “This means your engineers are more proactive in discovering user-impacting issues before bad app store reviews or support emails get sent, and you create a culture of building for user delight rather than fire-fighting.”

Anuj Jaiswal also joined Embrace as VP of R&D. Previously at VMware via the acquisition of Arkin, he drove the business line to 150% Y-o-Y revenue growth. With two decades of leading R&D teams, Jaiswal brings focus on growth, product design, and engineering excellence.

Embrace added Dan Wright, previously COO of AppDynamics and CEO of DataRobot, as the newest member of its board of directors. Wright brings a unique combination of AI and APM expertise to augment Embrace’s strategic plans to continue to grow into the mission-critical toolset for the entire mobile team.

“Leaders today are required to make mobile a strategic driver of their businesses,” said Eric Futoran, co-founder and CEO of Embrace. “With a shared mission alongside our investors and board, Embrace is addressing the ambitious future of mobile development by empowering builders who value the user.”

Marketing Technology News: Loyalty Simplified: Smart Ways to Boost Grocery Loyalty With Technology