The story
Omar Gabr and Moataz Soliman met as students at Cairo University, where they built an app for planning events with friends. According to the short, they showed it to around 60 Egyptian mobile companies and the response was mostly negative, except for one feature: testers could shake their phones to report a bug instantly. They dropped the original app and built Instabug around that idea, during the turmoil in Egypt in 2012. The company went through Flat6Labs, won the MIT Enterprise Forum Arab Startup Competition and raised a $300,000 seed round from investors including George Harik and Amr Awadallah. In 2016 it joined Y Combinator, only the second Egyptian company to do so, and raised $1.7 million led by Accel. Accel led a $5 million round in 2020 and Insight Partners led a $46 million Series B in 2022, when its tools ran on about 2.7 billion devices. In 2025 Instabug became Luciq, which Gabr describes as 'agentic mobile observability'.
By the numbers
Their company
EgyptAIInstabug
Mobile app observability platform, now using AI agents to find and fix app issues
