Crittercism raises $30M to monitor your app on everyone's phone

Big web companies like LinkedIn, Netflix, Pinterest, and Yahoo rely on a company called Crittercism to track the performance of their mobile apps. Adoption among such tech-savvy outfits should make it easy for Crittercism to sell its service into more companies, but new funding should help, too.

Today Crittercism announced a $30 million round, as well as new services that could make the company’s software more useful to enterprises, like an API for pushing Crittercism’s data into existing monitoring tools.

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The funding points to the value of management systems built just for mobile devices, rather than basic mobile support from application-performance management vendors like New Relic that focus more on the deployment of desktop-based sites.

“At the end of the day, you can’t manage mobile apps with web technology,” Crittercism cofounder and chief executive Andrew Levy told VentureBeat in an interview. “They have their own set of issues and a set of problems that our product addresses.”

Crittercism tries to distinguish itself by supporting a wide range of operating systems, web services, and carriers. It lets operations people set alerts that can go off when application performance degrades. And the tool can find issues with applications even when competing tools indicate everything is working OK, Levy said.

“I’d say our product is at least 18-24 months ahead of everyone else in the market,” he said.

Now Crittercism is looking to increase its lead with forthcoming technology it calls “zero-touch app wrapping” It will enable monitoring of mobile apps even when the company doesn’t have access to the code behind those apps. Such a capability could be valuable to IT managers who offer third-party business applications to lots of employees.

Scale Venture Partners led the new round in Crittercism. Accenture, InterWest Partners, and VMware also participated.

VMware’s participation in the funding stands out. The enterprise computing heavyweight demonstrated its interest in the mobile market by buying mobile-device management company Airwatch earlier this year. VMware’s willingness to back Crittercism could suggest an interest in bolstering its mobile capabilities further.

With the new funding, San Francisco-based Crittercism has raised a total $48.7 million to date, including a $12 million round from last year. The company started in 2011. It employs more than 70 people today and intends to have 130 employees by year’s end, Levy said.

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And if Levy is right about mobile-specific monitoring tools being important, the company will be in a position to grow further.