Japanese funder Global Brain Corporation, which invested in GeoSpock’s recent Series A round, has intensified its push into the Cambridge technology cluster by backing a $14 million Series B financing for debugging software business Undo.

The funding was led by Cambridge Innovation Capital, with new investors Global Brain Corporation and Parkwalk Advisors joining the round.

The funding will be used to grow Undo’s software development team, accelerate its product development and expand its US operations. All existing investor groups participated, including Rockspring, Martlet, Sir Peter Michael (founder of Quantel, Classic FM and California’s Peter Michael Winery), the Cambridge Angels group and Jaan Tallinn (co-founder of Skype and Kazaa).

Undo is setting a new standard in software debugging through its program execution capture & replay technology. It allows vendors of complex Linux applications to quickly diagnose severe software failures in test or in production and fix critical bugs that are impossible to reproduce (and therefore fix) by any other means.

Undo’s solution supports C/C++ applications today and it plans to use part of the funding to expand its language support to include Java, Python and others. Greg Law, Undo’s CEO and co-founder, said: “This Series B funding round will allow us to scale our commercial and customer success capacity.

“When an application crashes at a customer site, it is often impossible to obtain a complete picture of what happened. Yet software engineers need to know exactly what blew up where if they are going to fix the issue.

“Instead of a development team flailing around with unhelpful log files and core dumps, leaving clients irate whilst they are waiting for a vital fix, engineers can capture critical production failures ‘in the act’ in the form of a recording, turning failures into 100 per cent reproducible events. The recording can then be analysed using Undo’s reverse-debugger either at the customer site or back at base.”

Undo’s record, rewind and replay technology is also used by application vendors who would rather diagnose and fix serious software defects before they cause havoc in production.

Undo’s vision is to apply its unique technology to address the emerging $1trillion software accountability problem – for example, when courts need to determine why a self-driving car hit a pedestrian or when a bank is asked by its regulator to explain a suspect series of trades, or when Congress wants to know what lay behind certain behaviour from a social networking website.

Law says: “The world is entering a new era where software is beginning to make decisions that underpin our lives, our livelihoods, and even western democracy itself; software accountability is fast becoming a very big problem, now recognised by software companies, the major economic players, and governments.”

Undo secured its first seed funding in 2012 when the company was based in Law’s garden shed. Today Undo’s products are used by many of the world’s biggest software companies including SAP, Micro Focus and Mentor Graphics, and its technology has received numerous awards, including the arm ‘Best Software Product’ and the Gartner ‘Cool Vendor’ awards.