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Buglife, operating as The Invertebrate Conservation Trust, is a United Kingdom-based conservation charity dedicated to protecting invertebrate species and their ecosystems across Europe. The non-profit organization focuses on preventing the extinction of bees, beetles, spiders, and worms by addressing critical environmental threats such as habitat loss, climate change, and agricultural pesticide use. Operating with a workforce of 51 to 200 employees, the charity manages various ecological projects to ensure sustainable invertebrate populations that support essential ecosystem services like pollination, seed dispersal, and nutrient cycling. Recent organizational milestones include the discovery of a new-to-science beetle species, the Fence-climber Twiglet Weevil (Xenosacalles irlandikos), identified through regional fieldwork led by conservation officers such as Joshua Clarke and supported by key figures like Paul Hetherington. The conservation group Buglife was founded in 2002 by nature conservationist Alan Stubbs.
Buglife has raised $120K across 1 funding round.
Buglife has raised $120K in total across 1 funding round.
Buglife was a mobile software company that developed a bug reporting and user feedback SDK for iOS and Android apps, enabling users to capture bugs via shake gestures, screenshots, annotations, and automatic logs, which were routed to tools like Jira or Slack.[1][2][6] It served app developers and teams seeking to crowdsource user-reported issues beyond automated crash reporting, solving the problem of hard-to-automate UI/UX bugs in live apps while blurring sensitive data for privacy.[2] The company launched in 2016, joined Y Combinator, gained early traction for in-house and production use, but sunset its service in July 2025.[2][6]
Buglife was founded around 2016 by developers, including Anton Shukin, who built the tool initially for internal app testing before productizing it for broader use.[2] The idea emerged from the need for richer bug reports than existing tools like Crashlytics or Bugsnag provided, focusing on user-driven feedback with screenshots, drawings, notes, logs, and network data rather than just automated QA.[2] A pivotal moment came with its Y Combinator acceptance shortly after launch, accelerating growth as developers adopted it for live app stores; Shukin highlighted YC's non-technical support (e.g., hiring, contracts) as key.[2] Operations continued until discontinuation in July 2025.[6]
Buglife rode the 2010s mobile app boom, where live apps generated uncaught user bugs amid rising QA demands, timed perfectly post-iOS/Android maturity and pre-AI debugging dominance.[2] Market forces like developer tool fragmentation and user frustration in apps favored it, influencing the ecosystem by popularizing in-app feedback SDKs—pushing competitors toward hybrid automation/user models.[2] As a Y Combinator alum, it contributed to startup tooling trends, though its 2025 sunset reflects maturing alternatives (e.g., advanced telemetry in Firebase/Sentry).[6]
Buglife's discontinuation in July 2025 marks the end of a niche innovator in mobile debugging, likely absorbed by broader platforms amid SDK consolidation.[6] Trends like AI-driven bug prediction and no-code testing will shape successors, evolving influence toward integrated devops stacks rather than standalone user-feedback tools. Its legacy endures in prompting richer, privacy-aware reporting standards, tying back to empowering users to fix what devs can't see alone.[2]
Buglife has raised $120K across 1 funding round. Most recently, it raised $120K Seed in January 2018.
| Date | Round | Lead Investors | Other Investors | Status |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Jan 1, 2018 | $120K Seed | — | Brass PEN Ventures | Announced |
Buglife has raised $120K in total across 1 funding round.
Buglife's investors include Brass Pen Ventures.
