Late last year, Airbrake was acquired by the team at Exceptional, inc. We’re extremely excited about this move and we’d like to explain why.
A brief history
We created Hoptoad for our internal use in the fall of 2007 and launched it publicly in the spring of 2008. We had been tracking our errors previously with an email notifier that flooded our inboxes with repeat errors, many generated by search engines requesting weird URLs.
In 2011, we renamed the product Airbrake.
Over the years, Airbrake handled billions of error reports for thousands of web applications from all over the world. We kept the product focused on grouping similar errors, notifying developers once per error, and displaying the backtrace and session information to help debug the issue.
A serious commitment
As the number of customers and errors increased, we spent a lot of time addressing scaling issues. There were times we’d have 150,000 requests per minute, or requests with 500MB of session data.
Running Airbrake was like being under a constant DoS attack.
So, we spent very little time working toward our vision of a product that integrated more completely with developer tools.
Last year, we were approached by the Exceptional team and their Chief Strategic Officer, Jonathan Siegel (who has created or invested in RightSignature, RightScale, Intercom, and Iron.io). Exceptional had a team ready to work toward the same vision we had for Airbrake.
The future
After getting to know the Exceptional team, we felt their serious financial and team commitment had the best chance to turn our shared vision into reality. We agreed to sell Airbrake to Exceptional.
The new team has been handling all support issues and feature work for several months now. We’re very pleased with their work so far.
We continue to provide web design and development consulting and are developing Trajectory, Copycopter, and apprentice.io to help solve problems for web design and development teams.
Thank you
If you’ve been an Airbrake customer, thank you! It’s been a great experience for us and you continue to be in good hands with the new team.
Read more about the acquisition at TechCrunch and the past, present, and future of Airbrake at the Airbrake blog.
