We have placed our first investment with Mindscape, for a little over 5% of the company. We have been tracking Mindscape and their new product Raygun.io for a while, and were very happy that we were able to re-open an investment window that had been closed, becoming the largest investor in Mindscape’s capital raising round.
Mindscape was co-founded by John-Daniel (JD) Trask and Jeremy Boyd in 2007, and Lance had previously co-invested with JD, who is Mindscape’s CEO, in Valuecruncher back in 2007. That particular investment didn’t work out, although we all learned a lot in the process and much more since then.
JD and the Mindscape team went on to develop and sell a succession of well-regarded developer tools for the Microsoft platform, but the reason we are investing is for its latest tool, Raygun.io. Raygun is a dev-ops tool that automatically tracks errors and crashes in applications on PCs, the web and mobile devices. It helps companies find errors faster, and fix them more quickly, by telling them the exact line of code where the software error occurred.
Sales for Raygun are growing rapidly on the classic organic growth curve that we like to see, and at very healthy monthly growth rates. Along with the prospect of growth we get a lot of comfort from the steady sales of other products, which cover the costs of the core Mindscape team. Our investment will be used to accelerate the Raygun sales and product development.
