Wall Street’s recent volatility has spooked some founders and investors, but deals are still getting done — and for a lucky few, that means an exit.
Sentry, a late-stage, enterprise tech unicorn that provides application performance monitoring and error tracking, is acquiring Emerge Tools, a startup that makes developer tools for mobile apps, Business Insider has learned exclusively.
Founded in 2020, Emerge Tools has built several performance and optimization tools for mobile teams, such as app size, launch performance, visual regressions, and code health. Emerge Tools’ customers include OpenAI, Spotify, DoorDash, and Duolingo.
The startup was a member of startup accelerator Y Combinator’s Winter 2021 batch, and it raised a $1.7 million seed funding round in 2021 from Haystack, Matrix Partners, YC, and Liquid2 Ventures.
Josh Cohenzadeh, Emerge Tools’ cofounder and CEO, told Business Insider that the startup has been profitable for the majority of its life cycle and hadn’t been looking to raise a funding round or explicitly to exit.
But he and Sentry cofounder David Cramer had been following each other on X, formerly known as Twitter, for a long time, and it turned out that Cramer had circulated some of Emerge Tools’s tweets and blog posts to the Sentry team.
Their relationship — and the deal — originated in DMs.
“This wasn’t an overnight courtship thing, but the goal of an acquisition is that we make each other way better,” Cohenzadeh said.
He explained that Emerge Tools is bringing its suite of pre-development mobile app tools to Sentry while Sentry is providing Emerge Tools with a massive distribution upgrade: the former company is used by 4 million developers and 130,000 organizations.
The goal is that by joining forces, Sentry and Emerge Tools will become a one-stop shop for enterprises looking to launch an app while also debugging their website.
“This felt like a very peanut-butter-and-jelly situation,” Cohenzadeh said.
Founded in 2008, Sentry offers an open-source debugging software that monitors for and fixes code problems quickly. Its clients include Disney+, Cloudflare, GitHub, Anthropic, Vercel, and Atlassian.
The startup most recently raised a $90 million Series E funding round in 2022, led by Accel and BOND Capital, at a $3 billion valuation. In total, it has raised more than $200 million.
In 2021, Sentry acquired analytics firm Spectry; in 2022, it acquired Codecov, a startup helping software developers test their code before deploying it; and in 2023, it acquired web dev podcast Syntax.
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