Embrace announced the close of a preemptive funding round of $4.5 million in additional capital, led by Pritzker Group Venture Capital and joined by Greycroft and Vy Capital with follow-on from mobile-first experts, including the founders of Parse and MoPub, Eniac Ventures, and The Chernin Group.

This investment will help further its mission of automating identification of user issues and removing diagnostic inefficiencies for mobile engineering teams, with the ultimate goal of finally improving in-app mobile experiences without the inherently flawed feedback loop of a complaint, bad review, or uninstallation.

Embrace provides a comprehensive unified health and optimization platform dedicated to mobile applications. The company's technology enables businesses to make their apps stable and faster through an automated analysis of each and every user session.

Eric Futoran, co-founder and CEO of Embrace (and co-founder of Scopely), said: "Each of us, as mobiles users, continues to have poor experiences with our favorite mobile apps, and amazingly there is no efficient feedback loop to developers on which they can quickly prioritize and act. I faced this while helping to build Scopely. We're excited to already enable companies to identify and respond to issues impacting their market-leading apps. The platform has proven to reduce churn, drive engagement and increase revenues, and we look forward to educating the ecosystem, improving every mobile app, and ultimately making our own experiences so much better."

Gabe Greenbaum, LA-based Partner for Pritzker Group Venture Capital, said: "Embrace has an impressive founding team with strong roots in mobile. We saw many organizations trust Embrace's seamless and innovative optimization platform to quickly identify and resolve any user-impacting issues within their apps, and we're optimistic about the future of the company in this growing market. We look forward to this next stage in the company's growth journey and are honored to partner with Eric and Fredric to help them achieve their vision."

Dana Settle, Founding Partner at Greycroft, said: "Embrace is the company with the best platform and leadership to become the category leader in the rapidly growing, although still young APM market for mobile. The company has the ability to leverage its unique performance technology for the entire mobile industry."

More than 15% of users have suboptimal experiences directly tied to the performance of apps, and while many users complain of "crashes," almost all of these issues are not true app crashes. We, as users, all experience these issues, such as a slow startup with an endless spinner that forces us to close the app, a video that never seems to start, or a purchase that never goes through. For those issues of which the developers are aware, they are often too difficult to diagnose and impossible to reproduce. For many issues, there is no feedback loop (not even a crash stacktrace or complaint) and the users just leave -- to never return.

Embrace's platform analyzes and replays the details of every single user session to more accurately and quickly detect, diagnose and resolve any user-impacting issues. Embrace does not sample. The massive volumes of data gathered and processed has only become feasible in the last two years with the high scale and low-costs of cloud computing. Embrace is the first to capture and enhance that new power to become the next generation of APM. As a result, the platform typically uncovers 5X more issues than previously known by mobile teams and app developers.