---
title: Airbrake Acquired By Exceptional
teaser: We've sold our error tracking service to Exceptional.
tags: news,airbrake
author: Dan Croak
published_on: 2012-02-07
---

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](http://rightsignature.com),
[RightScale](http://www.rightscale.com/), [Intercom](http://intercom.io), and
[Iron.io](http://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](http://apptrajectory.com), [Copycopter](http://copycopter.com), and
[apprentice.io](http://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](http://techcrunch.com/2012/02/07/exceptional-acquires-error-tracking-application-airbrake/)
and the past, present, and future of Airbrake at the [Airbrake
blog](http://blog.airbrake.io/airbrake-news/how-exceptional-and-airbrake-first-met/).