Undo raises £1.5m led by Cambridge Innovation Capital and Sir Peter Michael
This article covers Undo, a startup, which closed a seed funding round of £1.5m in April 2015. The funding will be used to expand its reversible debugging tools for Linux and Android and to hire commercial and marketing leads, supporting developers and vendors addressing costly, hard-to-reproduce software failures.
Undo has closed a seed funding round of £1.5m to expand its reversible debugging tools for Linux and Android, bringing new investors Cambridge Innovation Capital and entrepreneur Sir Peter Michael alongside existing backers including Skype co-founder Jaan Tallinn and members of the Cambridge Angels. The money will be used to broaden the product portfolio, hire commercial and marketing leads, and grow the team — a move that matters for companies wrestling with costly, hard-to-reproduce software failures.
Why it matters
Debugging remains a persistent drag on developer productivity, particularly for complex, deployed systems. Undo’s technology lets engineers record program execution and replay it to inspect failures without needing to reproduce problems in-house, cutting the time it can take to find elusive bugs. That capability can be especially valuable to vendors and teams building mission-critical software where downtime and defects carry real business risk.
The round also signals continued interest in tooling companies coming out of Cambridge’s tech cluster, and it brings an institutional investor in Cambridge Innovation Capital into a company previously backed largely by angels and entrepreneurs.
Inside the product
Undo’s flagship offerings are LiveRecorder, launched in January 2015, and UndoDB, a reversible debugger for Linux and Android. LiveRecorder captures exact executions from customer environments so developers can replay and inspect failures locally. UndoDB provides record‑rewind‑replay debugging for C and C++ code, helping teams trace hard-to-find defects by stepping backward through execution.
The company also introduced UndoDB Out-and-About, a new licensing model intended to make deployments outside the lab easier. Undo says its tools are used by more than 1,000 developers at customers such as Cadence Design Systems and Mentor Graphics — both major electronic design automation vendors where debugging low-level, performance-critical code is central to product quality.
Who are the investors?
The £1.5m round combines new and continuing backers. New lead investors include Cambridge Innovation Capital (CIC) and Sir Peter Michael, the entrepreneur behind Quantel and Classic FM. Existing supporters include Jaan Tallinn, co‑founder of Skype and Kazaa, and investors drawn from the Cambridge Angels network. The round was oversubscribed and closed in April 2015.
In the announcement, Victor Christou, Senior Investment Director at Cambridge Innovation Capital, said:
Undo matches our investment criteria perfectly, with its innovative product combined with the ability to achieve significant scale on a global stage. Linux is the most widely used computer operating system for enterprise, and debugging costs the industry £116.2bn ($156bn) a year [1]. The impact of downtime in mission critical software is far greater, so the market potential for a debugger that can be used even after an application is shipped is immense.
The investor mix — a specialist Cambridge fund, a serial entrepreneur, and experienced angel investors — reflects a belief that developer tooling for enterprise Linux and Android can scale internationally when paired with focused commercial hires.
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Founder perspective
In the announcement, Greg Law, CEO and co‑founder at Undo, said:
Undo has seen tremendous growth over the last year, as we have expanded our product portfolio and signed new customers internationally. The building blocks are in place and our new funding will enable us to accelerate our expansion, targeting the very fast-growing market for advanced software development tools for Linux and Android through a wider product range, greater development resources and increased focus on sales.
Undo is using the funding to strengthen go-to-market capability with hires including Elan Tanzer as Vice President of Marketing and Michael Whittingham as Vice President of Global Sales. Tanzer brings more than 20 years’ industry experience including time at ARM and Global Graphics, while Whittingham joins from Canonical with prior roles at Symbian, where he focused on global partnerships and licensing.
The bigger picture
The deal is a reminder that the UK’s innovation ecosystem still produces specialist developer tools that attract both entrepreneurial and institutional capital. For the Cambridge cluster, CIC’s participation is consistent with its stated aim of providing long-term growth funding to local technology companies. The involvement of high‑profile angels like Jaan Tallinn also underlines how experienced founders continue to recycle capital and expertise into early-stage technology ventures.
As enterprises continue to rely on Linux and Android across infrastructure and embedded systems, developer productivity tools that reduce debugging time remain commercially relevant across Europe. This seed round positions Undo to push its product into larger vendor accounts and to deepen commercial channels at a time when engineering velocity and reliability are increasingly strategic concerns for software teams.
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