Runway receives $ 2 million in preliminary funding and introduces its "flight control system" for mobile app releases.

Runway, a company that stemmed from the difficulties experienced by Rent the Runway's original iOS team, has now not tested and released its service that streamlines the release cycle for mobile apps - or, as the team calls it, provides "flight control" for mobile versions. In addition, Bedrock Capital led an initial $ 2 million investment round for the company's product.

Array Ventures, Chapter One, Breakpoint Capital, Liquid 2 Ventures, Four Cities, Harvard Management Seed Capital, SoftBank Opportunity Fund and many angels are among the other investors.

Co-founders Gabriel Savit, Isabel Barrera, David Filion and Matt Varghese came up with the idea for Runway after working together on the first mobile app team on Rent the Runway. They discovered that getting an app release out the door requires a lot of overhead in the form of time invested and wasted, as well as a lot of back and forth on internal communications applications like Slack. Interdisciplinary teams consisting of engineers, product, marketing, design, QA and others must keep each other updated on their respective parts of the app's release process - something that is still often done via shared documents and spreadsheets.

Runway, on the other hand, provides an alternative with its specialized software created exclusively to handle the various stages of the app's release cycle.

The system includes modern enterprise technologies such as GitHub, JIRA, Trello, Bitrise, CircleCI and others to automatically alert teams of what has been done and what action remains. Since its beta launch this spring, Runway has more than quadrupled the number of available integrations, which now include technologies such as Linear, Pivotal Tracker, Jenkins, GitHub Actions, GitLab CI, Travis CI, Slack, Bugsnag, Sentry, TestRail and more, and more on the way .

During its testing phase, Runway was used by a small number of early customers, including ClassPass, Kickstarter, Capsule and others, who had released more than 40 apps with their platform in March.

According to the company, it has more than quadrupled its customer list since its beta, which now includes Gusto, NTWRK, Brex and Chick-fil-A, as well as some larger companies at the corporate end of the spectrum. (We understand that one is an "app for delivering favorite meals.") Several of these customers have also provided statements of support for adopting Runway instead of their previous approaches. ClassPass Mobile Lead Sanjay Thakur, for example, stated that the method resulted in "less misunderstanding" and "less time spent on releases."

"Our engineers tell me that their burden as sprint release managers has diminished," Thakur added. 

Hari Singh, Senior iOS Engineer at Kickstarter, said that "things are easier now" with Runway, and that "it's great to have all our team members looking at the same thing all the time." "There is no subjective perspective on what is happening," he said.

"Runway has not only made releases faster, but emotional tension around releases is something we no longer have to worry about," says NTWRK Senior Software Engineer Dave Cowart. "In the past, we were careful to distribute as often as we would have liked. We know it will work well now, and we know it will require the least amount of work."

As of now, Runway claims that its early users have sent out 60x software versions with its platform since March, a total of over 700. Since the beta version in March, it has also made a number of significant product adjustments and improvements.

These include the addition of many more automations for tasks that would otherwise have been handled manually or other chores such as automatically pausing unstable phase versions, automatically accelerating stable phase versions, adding standard version comments for the app stores' "What's New" section, support for rollouts with automatically increasing increments (including Android), select the latest version in the app stores, submit new versions for beta testing and so on.

Runway has also added support for faster hotfix releases, an approval feature that includes external stakeholders, a screenshot and approval port, downloads of artifacts directly from the CI pipeline, integrations with regression testing, integrations with stability monitoring, test track integrations of TestFlight and Play Store. , additional features for frequent releases, such as pressing the version number in the code and support for roles, permissions and access control. It also has SOC 2 certification.

One area where it is still working is to make the introduction of new customers easier. Because Runway is intended to be a broad platform, the initial installation procedure, where a client links Runway to their various apps and services, can be time consuming. However, Runway believes that its ability to adapt to the different tools and procedures used by different teams will ultimately be a selling point rather than an obstacle to its adoption.

As it prepares for its debut, Runway will continue to charge $ 400 per month per app for its normal level, but it has now introduced customized enterprise pricing for larger companies, as it has more advanced companies underway. According to our sources, new prices for independent teams may be introduced in the future.

Runway claims that they will use the extra money to hire many full-time developers (especially former mobile engineers) as well as a full-time employee to help with growth and marketing. It has already hired its first full-time employee, a former senior mobile engineer.