For many people, just a weekend spent with siblings can be stressful.
But even after nearly two decades of building companies together, Masha Liberman and her three siblings are still going strong.
"We don't just work together because we're siblings," the cofounder and chief business officer of the startup Product Science told Insider. "But we've been through a lot and have developed a certain way of working together."
Though all four siblings have worked together on previous projects, Masha, Daniil, and David Liberman's latest venture, the mobile app performance management startup Product Science, just landed $17 million in Series A funding from Coatue, K5 Global, and Peter Fenton from Benchmark.
Product Science aims to help developers improve the performance of mobile apps. Using artificial intelligence, the startup's tech simplifies the different ways of how users are interacting with an app into a clear sequence of functions and then identifies any issues or inefficiencies in that sequence that may be slowing down app performance.
The siblings came up with the idea behind the company after all three worked at Snap, improving the app's performance on mobile devices. Although app delays aren't noticeable to most users, there's a long tail of consumers on older devices whose experiences can be significantly hindered by poor app performance, Liberman said.
The Libermans took a unique approach to startup-building. The four created a holding company, the Libermans Company, in 2021, and promised investors a share of all projects or companies they launch until 2051. In doing so, they're able to easily "finance their risky projects and moonshots" and be "more strategic around the risks of not raising funds, which is important in this current market environment," Liberman told Insider.
Initially, Product Science was a 100% subsidiary of the Libermans Company and leveraged $1 million of funding from its parent company to get started, but with the latest round, the startup added outside investors who are not also invested in the holding company, Liberman said.
With the additional funds, the founders plan to work towards their long-term vision of building artificial intelligence that can not only identify issues within mobile apps, but also fix them. Liberman added that Product Science will also increase its headcount from around 40 people to 80 to 100 within the year and release a self-service version of its product this summer, expanding access to its solutions beyond its current enterprise customers.