Bug tracking startup BugHerd has secured a further one million dollars in Series A funding from Australian investors Tank Stream Ventures and Starfish Ventures to help expand its product line.
The company markets Bugherd, a tool that supports collaborative development by allowing a non-technical user to place a pin with a comment on a website.
“We are a profitable company but we were at a crossroads,” Alan Downie, BugHerd's CEO told iTnews, “we could continue organically growing but we decided there was a very large opportunity in the digital agency space that is under served by our competitors.”
The funding will be used to split BugHerd into three distinct products that can be purchased as a suite or as fully functional stand alone products.
The existing BugHerd solution will be split into Stack and BugHerd with a third solution, Brief, spun out of the the features of the original BugHerd solution that appeal to creative agencies.
Stack, which is now available supports web, desktop and mobile development environments, caters to project managers and developers who need to manage tasks in a collaborative environment.
There are plans to extend the Stack solution to create sprints, mark dupes, create reports, and to work across multiple projects at once and support time tracking and estimates.
To better capture the expanded opportunity in the digital marketplace, BugHerd’s core functionality will be further developed to improve workflow to provide Brief.
“Working with a digital agency, it can be quite hard to have your thoughts and opinions heard in something other than a face to face meeting. Brief allows you to tag a webpage with comments and supports feedback early in the development cycle, rather than at QA which can be too late for some agency’s clients.”
Brief is currently under development but, according to Downie, is the first of what could be a series of industry-specific solutions for the BugHerd team.
The solution suites technology stack includes the ability to plug into a third party application, acquire data and feedback and metadata about the user and send that through to an end point.
“We can roll that out across mostly java script and browser extension. We can change that approach dependent upon the targets-for example mobile devices.”
For existing BugHerd users, Downie reassured “we’ll keep supporting the old app for the foreseeable future.”
