Embrace raises $20 million to help developers build better games and mobile apps

Embrace, which has a suite of tools to help mobile developers build better games and apps, has raised $20 million in funding.

Headquartered in Culver City, California, the company was founded by CEO Eric Futoran, who was formerly a cofounder of Scopely, which Savvy Gaming Group bought this year for $4.9 billion.

NEA led the round with entries from Greycroft, AV8 (Allianz) and Eniac. The funding will be used to drive continued product innovation to help mobile teams create the best experiences, Futoran said in an interview with GamesBeat. Funding has been on the rise.

Embrace focuses on mobile experience builders. It gives mobile teams, especially their engineers, insight into all the variables, across hardware, software, networks and UX, that shape every single end user’s mobile experiences, enabling them to identify and prioritize impact on the user of any problem.

We help mobile engineers create better experiences. So the view hasn’t changed, Futoran said. There are too many toolsets that require a common language, a common solution. So that’s who we are with all of our engineering solution expertise.

Provide information to engineers

When Embrace started, it focused on the core issues, like giving engineers the ability to replicate bugs and seeing exactly where an app or game failed or otherwise quit. It has now expanded to include all the things a developer needs to improve and ship a game more easily.

Embrace gives mobile teams, especially their engineers, a single view into all the variables, across hardware, software, networks, and UX, that shape every end user’s mobile experiences. This
the level of knowledge allows teams to identify and prioritize the user impact of any issue; this level of detail allows engineers to solve problems instantly; this level of understanding shifts a team’s focus from reactive bug fixes to uncovering the greatest ROI opportunities to improve performance.

Sitting at the intersection of mobile technology and pop culture, Cameo must constantly move at the speed of light, Dom Scandinaro, Cameo’s senior vice president of engineering and data, said in a statement. Embrace has fundamentally changed the way we operate our mobile app so that we can quickly identify issues and, in turn, continue to create flawless and personalized fan experiences.

The company has received similar praise from Chris To, vice president of technology at GOAT. He said his company remained 99.99 percent accident-free during a period of record traffic.

And Chris Lavender, vice president of software engineering at Hatch, said in a statement, “Embrace helps our team ensure that our app experience is as simple and relaxing as our real-world products. As a company dedicated to rest and well-being, it is essential that the mobile experience we offer 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.

Origins

Futoran co-founded Scopely in 2011. At Scopely, Futoran handled many internal functions while co-founder Walter Driver, now co-CEO, handled many external matters. Futoran left about six years ago and one of the things he did was sign a licensing deal with Hasbro on the Monopoly property. The game recently launched after six years of work.

While at Scopely, Futoran felt that mobile gaming was in its infancy. Games broke down, and it wasn’t a surprise when teams were working with many different datasets without a unified language for the entire team. So, in Embrace, he decided to build it, starting at the end of 2016.

The lack of cohesion in the industry was the perfect condition to build my company, she said.

There are crash reporting tools, but there wasn’t a whole chain of tools to help larger engineering teams. The tools emerged in pieces. This applies to mobile games and other devices such as Taco Bell store screens.

If you don’t have the rest of the picture if you don’t have all that data, you can’t proactively identify where user experiences break down, Futoran said.

Embrace has doubled the number of employees in 18 months. In addition to Culver City, the firm has other offices in Palo Alto, Buenos Aires and London. It has about 115 people.

The company recently added Andrew Tunall as vice president and chief product officer. Previously he was the vice president of product at New Relic, where he led observability.

Many monitoring and observability tools are fire alarms and insurance. They tell you when things are on fire and the engineers hope they don’t have to use them. We see adoption of Embrace by mobile engineers about eight times that of tools built for Ops, Tunall said in a statement. This means your engineers are more proactive in discovering issues impacting users before negative app store reviews or support emails are sent, and you create a culture of building for the delight of users rather than fighting fires .

The company has grown its client base 130% from a year ago and counts The New York Times, Yum Brands, Discover, Marriott, Yahoo and other major brands as clients.

Embrace has an impressive client roster, including companies like Discover, Marriott and the New York Times, reflecting how invaluable they have become to the mobile success of the world’s biggest brands, NEA partner Aaron Jacobson said in a statement. . Mobile app usage is growing rapidly, and much of the market segment is still operating with legacy tools. There is a huge gap between what vendors in the observability space are offering and what mobile engineers want and need to truly delight their users.

The company noted that consumers spent a record $33.9 billion on mobile app purchases in the first quarter of 2023 alone. In addition to mobile apps, a huge amount of spending now occurs on point-of-sale systems ( tablets), workforce productivity devices, automotive telemetry and infotainment, and more.

Anuj Jaiswal also joined Embrace as Vice President of Research and Development. Previously at VMware via the Arkin acquisition, led the line of business to 150% year-over-year revenue growth. With two decades of leadership in R&D teams, Jaiswal focuses on growth, product design and engineering excellence.

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