bitdrift

bitdrift is a company focused on the mobile observability market, offering a platform designed to give developers enhanced visibility into application performance on mobile devices. The business targets a common frustration among developers: the high cost and inefficiency of existing observability solutions, which often leads to limited data logging and poor insight into application issues.

The company was founded by Peter Morelli (CEO), Matt Klein, and Martin Conte Mac Donell. Their collective experience at technology companies like Lyft, Twitter, AWS, and Google informed their perspective that the observability market was misaligned with customer needs. Matt Klein is notably the creator of the open-source project Envoy Proxy. The technology behind bitdrift was initially developed and battle-tested within Lyft, where it supported over 50 million devices and reportedly saved the company tens of millions of dollars annually. Recognizing its potential, the team officially spun out of Lyft to form bitdrift as an independent entity in 2023. The spin-out was a complex process, but it resulted in Lyft becoming bitdrift's first major customer.

bitdrift's core service, Capture, fundamentally changes the approach to data logging. Instead of selectively logging to control costs, its model is to "log everything, intelligently choose what to store, and instantly deploy changes to your entire fleet." The platform's SDK, which has been run in production on millions of devices via the Lyft app, allows for the capture of rich, on-device logs. This enables developers to surface important sessions for rapid debugging without waiting for a new application release cycle. This approach gives developers real-time control over telemetry data, aiming to reduce the time it takes to identify and resolve bugs from days or weeks to mere hours.

The company operates on a model that includes a free tier to encourage adoption. In December 2023, bitdrift announced a $15 million Series A funding round led by Amplify Partners, equipping it to expand its go-to-market strategy and product development. While its initial focus is on mobile, bitdrift plans to extend its capabilities across the entire distributed system, including servers and the mobile edge. Keywords: mobile observability, application performance monitoring, APM, developer tools, log management, telemetry, mobile debugging, real-time control, engineering efficiency, session replay, Lyft spin-out, Envoy, Peter Morelli, Matt Klein, Martin Conte Mac Donell, client-side monitoring, software development kit, SDK, production debugging, Amplify Partners