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Cambridge Enterprise sister organisation Cambridge Innovation Capital plc (CIC) has led a $14 million Series B funding round in Undo, a pioneer in the development of new software debugging technologies. The funding will be used to grow Undo’s software development team, accelerate its product development and expand its US operations.

Victor Christou, CEO of CIC commented: “Undo is typical of the sort of business in which CIC invests. It has innovative technology, which addresses the challenges brought about by the problem of software accountability. Undo has built a commercially applicable solution to a real market need and is a testament to the high calibre of businesses that are flourishing in the Cambridge cluster. We are very pleased with the progress Undo has made since we first invested in 2015 and are delighted to continue to support the business as it gains further commercial traction.”

Undo is setting a new standard in software debugging through its program execution capture and replay technology, allowing vendors of complex Linux applications to diagnose quickly severe software failures, in test or in production, and fix critical bugs that are impossible to reproduce (and therefore fix) by any other means. Undo’s solution supports C/C++ application today, and it plans to use part of the funding to expand its language support to include Java, Python and others.

Undo’s CEO and co-founder Greg Law said: “This Series B funding round will allow us to scale our commercial and customer success capacity. When an application crashes at a customer site, it is often impossible to obtain a complete picture of what happened. Yet software engineers need to know exactly what blew up where if they are going to fix the issue. Instead of a development team flailing around with unhelpful log files and core dumps, leaving clients irate whilst they are waiting for a vital fix, engineers can capture critical production failures ‘in the act’ in the form of a recording, turning failures into 100% reproducible events. The recording can then be analysed using Undo’s reverse-debugger either at the customer site or back at base”.

Undo’s record, rewind and replay technology is also used by application vendors who would rather diagnose and fix serious software defects before they cause havoc in production. Its products are used by many of the world’s biggest software companies including SAP, Micro Focus and Mentor Graphics. Undo’s technology has received numerous awards, including the ARM ‘Best Software Product’ and the Gartner ‘Cool Vendor’ awards.

Undo’s vision is to apply its unique technology to address the emerging $1 trillion software accountability problem—for example, when the courts need to determine why a self-driving car hit a pedestrian, when a bank is asked by its regulator to explain a suspect series of trades or when Congress wants to know what lay behind certain behaviour from a social networking website.

Greg Law explains: “The world is entering a new era where software is beginning to make decisions that underpin our lives, our livelihoods and even Western democracy itself; software accountability is fast becoming a very big problem, now recognised by software companies, major economic players and governments”.

Image: MS-DOS Blue Horizontal by Kjetil Korslien via Flickr