Jam’s out to revitalize and enhance internal bug reporting

Most internal bug fixing workflows are entirely disconnected from the activity that triggered the bug, consisting mostly of written reports from users. Jam’s founders wanted to change that by automatically collecting a bunch of information related to the bug and delivering a complete package to engineering with the goal of fixing bugs much faster.

Today, the startup announced a $9 million Series A to help them to keep building on that idea.

So how does it work? “Jam is a browser extension that hooks into dev tools and all the underlying information underneath the application [you’re using]. When anyone who has Jam installed sees a bug, they just click on the Jam extension, and it copies a link to their clipboard to share with engineering,” Dani Grant, Jam co-founder told TechCrunch.

The link includes a 30-second video instant replay of what was happening in the moments prior to experiencing the bug, so the engineer can see exactly what happened. The link also includes console logs, network request timing information and even custom metadata like user ID, team ID or whatever is relevant to the company.

Grant said this is markedly different from a typical bug fixing report, which often lacks context or detail, and is usually a human-generated report of what happened, which can often be fuzzy and unclear. That means that the engineer, who collects the report, has to do a lot of detective work to figure out what the problem is, or if there even was an actual problem. Jam arms them with enough information to fully understand the nature of the bug and what they need to do to fix it.

Grant and her co-founder Mohd Irtefa both cut their teeth at Cloudflare in product management and they saw firsthand how difficult it could be to communicate a bug to the engineers. They saw an opportunity and launched the company in 2020 with the goal of making it simpler and more efficient to report and fix bugs.

The two founders spent quite a bit of time trying to find an elegant solution to the problem, and actually created seven iterations before the eighth one did the trick. In April of 2022, they opened it up to the world. “One of the things we did differently with the eighth version is we didn’t let it out the door until it was so high quality it was production ready. And actually, I think it’s part of the reason why this one did so much better,” she said.

The product is free for individual users, but $10 per user month for teams. There is also custom pricing available for high-volume enterprise users.

Grant reports they have 15 employees supporting around 75,000 users. She aspires to keep her team lean. “I really believe in these small lean senior teams. I think they’re mighty. I think they can do more than big teams,” she said. “What I saw at Cloudflare is that when things were important, they [actually] put fewer people on it, not more. I hope that we can be like Instagram, a company with like 20 people supporting a million users.”

Today’s $8.9 million round was led by GGV Capital with participation from Figma Ventures and some high-profile industry angels. The company reports that partners Hans Tung and Glenn Solomon are leading GGV’s investment, and that this is only the third time these two partners have joined forces on an investment, with the other two being Airbnb and Slack. Jam’s founders hope to follow in those footsteps.