Embracing the Future of Mobile Data

Over the past decade, the proliferation of mobile has transformed the way people across the world live, work, and play. We’ve seen mobile expand beyond cellphones into all intelligent devices from IoT, to point-of-sale, to AR, and more. More recently, the COVID-19 pandemic has hastened this mobile eventuality, with corporations accelerating digitalization by seven years according to McKinsey. Mobile is now at the forefront of every strategic conversation with billions of dollars riding on everyday interactions through mobile channels. Companies cannot afford to be in the dark about their mobile users yet gathering and analyzing the relevant, comprehensive data remains challenging. This is why today we are excited to announce our Series B investment in Embrace, which has developed a powerful mobile data platform to help all customers deliver incredible mobile experiences.

We at NEA understand the power of data having been fortunate to partner with pioneers from Tableau (data visualization), Databricks (data, analytics, and AI unification), and Datarobot (democratizing access to data science). Additionally, as early backers of companies such as Robinhood, MasterClass, Scopely, and Branch, we know how stellar mobile experiences can unlock huge businesses. However, we have seen how difficult it is to craft the perfect experience since current data infrastructure and observability tools do not enable teams to make fully informed decisions affecting adoption, retention, and revenue. The current monitoring paradigm using sampling—where metrics are aggregated, and only pinpoints of data are read—is broken. With contemporary approaches, less than 2% of mobile session data is collected because:

1. There are overwhelmingly high volumes of data to collect for mobile. Every session is unique given the nature of mobile devices and users, which means sampling data is no longer an effective approach.

2. Mobile data is difficult to collect. Mobile is compiled code running on the device, and internet connection assumptions are no longer valid.

3. There is high cardinality. There is an infinite combination of variables given each device represents a user with unique usage patterns.

After experiencing these pain points first-hand, Embrace co-founders Eric Futoran and Fredric Newberg set their sights on developing a solution that consumes 100% of user-behavioral and technical time-based session data. Eric previously co-founded the mobile gaming company Scopely, where they made top-grossing mobile games including The Walking Dead and Star Trek. When there were issues with users playing games, Eric wanted a platform where he could simply look up a user, pick a session, and instantly understand what went wrong. Fredric Newberg, CTO and Co-Founder, shared the same desire for a mobile data solution after engineering three previous startups focused on the mobile space, and building systems that scale to handle the high data volumes that mobile analytics platforms require. Frederic has designed and built backend systems that handled 1,500 applications, 250M monthly active users, and 150B events each month for customers around the globe. Eric and Fredric have closely witnessed the struggle companies face to proactively get ahead of issues in mobile apps before they impact users and lead to churn.

Embrace's solution is simple and elegant—teams can look a user up, pick a session, and access a complete view of what’s going on. Underlying Embrace is a verticalized mobile data platform that collects every session for every user to produce high-fidelity user experience data, rendering it 100% accessible and actionable for numerous use cases such as crash reporting, session replay, or networking monitoring. Customers can even leverage Embrace’s comprehensive data to create their own advanced analytics including training AI models. By capturing every session and user, Embrace unlocks huge opportunities for businesses to proactively get ahead of issues.

We believe companies need the visibility Embrace provides to make their mobile users happy and succeed in this digital, mobile-first age. NEA is thrilled to be partnering with Embrace and we look forward to working with Eric, Fredric, and the rest of the team in helping customers transform their complex mobile data into action.

If you’re interested in joining the Embrace team, you can find open positions at: Careers | Embrace