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Sleuth raises $3M Seed to bring order to continuous deployment
Sleuth, an early stage startup from three former Atlassian employees, wants to bring some much-needed order to the continuous delivery process. Today, the company announced it has raised a $3 million seed round.
CRV led the round with participation from angel investors from New Relic, Atlassian and LaunchDarkly.
“Sleuth is a deployment tracker built to solve the confusion that comes when companies have adopted continuous delivery,” says CEO and co-founder Dylan Etkin. The company’s founders recognized that more and more companies were making the move to continuous delivery deployment, and they wanted to make it easier to track those deployments and figure out where the bottle necks were.
He says that typically, on any given DevOps team, there are perhaps two or three people who know how the entire system works, and with more people spread out now, it’s more important than ever that everyone has that capability. Etkin says Sleuth lets everyone on the team understand the underlying complexity of the delivery system with the goal of helping them understand the impact of a given change they made.
“Sleuth is trying to make that better by targeting the developer and really giving them a communications platform, so that they can discuss the [tools] and understand what is changing and who has changed what. And then more importantly, what is the impact of my change,” he explained.
Image Credit: Sleuth
The company was founded by three former Atlassian alumni — Ektin along with Michael Knighten and Don Brown — all of whom were among the first 50 employees at the now tremendously successful development tools company.
That kind of pedigree tends to get the attention of investors like CRV, but it is also telling that three companies including their former employer saw enough potential here to invest in the company, and be using the product.
Etkin recognizes this is a tricky time to launch an early-stage startup. He said that when he first entered the lock down, his inclination was to hunker down, but they concluded that their tool would have even greater utility at the moment. “The founders took stock and we were always building a tool that was great for remote teams and collaboration in general, and that hasn’t changed… if anything, I think it’s becoming more important right now.”
The company plans to spend the next 6-9 months refining the product, adding a few folks to the five person team and finding product-market fit. There is never an ideal time to start a company, but Sleuth believes now is its moment. It may not be easy, but they are taking a shot.
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Puppet names former Cloud Foundry Foundation executive director Abby Kearns as CTO
Puppet, the Portland-based infrastructure automation company, today announced that it has named former Cloud Foundry Foundation executive director Abby Kearns as its new CTO.
Current Puppet CTO Deepak Giridharagopal will remain in his role and focus on R&D and leading new projects, while Kearns will focus on expanding the company’s product portfolio and communicating with enterprise audiences.
Kearns stepped down from her role at the Cloud Foundry Foundation earlier this month after holding that position since 2016. At the time, she wasn’t quite ready to reveal her next move, though, and her taking the CTO job at Puppet comes as a bit of a surprise. Despite a lot of usage and hype in its early days, Puppet isn’t often seen as an up-and-coming company anymore, after all. But Kearns argues that a lot of this is due to perception.
“Puppet had great technology and really drove the early DevOps movement, but they kind of fell off the face of the map,” she said. “Nobody thought of them as anything other than config management, and so I was like, well, you know, problem number one: fix that perception problem if that’s no longer the reality or otherwise, everyone thinks you’re dead.”
Since Kearns had already started talking to Puppet CEO Yvonne Wassenaar, who took the job in January 2019, she joined the product advisory board about a year ago and the discussion about Kearns joining the company became serious a few months later.
“We started talking earlier this year,” said Kearns. “She said: ‘You know, wouldn’t it be great if you could come help us? I’m building out a brand new executive team. We’re really trying to reshape the company.’ And I got really excited about the team that she built. She’s got a really fantastic new leadership team, all of them are there for less than a year. they have a new CRO, new CMO. She’s really assembled a fantastic team of people that are super smart, but also really thoughtful people.”
Kearns argues that Puppet’s product has really changed, but that the company didn’t really talk about it enough, despite the fact that 80% of the Global 5,000 are customers.
Given the COVID-19 pandemic, Kearns has obviously not been able to meet the Puppet team yet, but she told me that she’s starting to dig deeper into the company’s product portfolio and put together a strategy. “There’s just such an immensely talented team here. And I realize every startup tells you that, but really, there’s actually a lot of talented people here that are really nice. And I guess maybe it’s the Portland in them, but everyone’s nice,” she said.
“Abby is keenly aware of Puppet’s mission, having served on our Product Advisory Board for the last year, and is a technologist at heart,” said Wassenaar. “She brings a great balance to this position for us – she has deep experience in the enterprise and understands how to solve problems at massive scale.”
In addition to Kearns, former Cloud Foundry Foundation VP of marketing Devin Davis also joined Puppet as the company’s VP of corporate marketing and communications.
Update: we updated the post to clarify that Deepak Giridharagopal will remain in his role.
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Checkly raises $2.25M seed round for its monitoring and testing platform
Checkly, a Berlin-based startup that is developing a monitoring and testing platform for DevOps teams, today announced that it has raised a $2.25 million seed round led by Accel. A number of angel investors, including Instana CEO Mirko Novakovic, Zeit CEO Guillermo Rauch and former Twilio CTO Ott Kaukver, also participated in this round.
The company’s SaaS platform allows developers to monitor their API endpoints and web apps — and it obviously alerts you when something goes awry. The transaction monitoring tool makes it easy to regularly test interactions with front-end websites without having to actually write any code. The test software is based on Google’s open-source Puppeteer framework and to build its commercial platform, Checkly also developed Puppeteer Recorder for creating these end-to-end testing scripts in a low-code tool that developers access through a Chrome extension.
The team believes that it’s the combination of end-to-end testing and active monitoring, as well as its focus on modern DevOps teams, that makes Checkly stand out in what is already a pretty crowded market for monitoring tools.
“As a customer in the monitoring market, I thought it had long been stuck in the 90s and I needed a tool that could support teams in JavaScript and work for all the different roles within a DevOps team. I set out to build it, quickly realizing that testing was equally important to address,” said Tim Nolet, who founded the company in 2018. “At Checkly, we’ve created a market-defining tool that our customers have been demanding, and we’ve already seen strong traction through word of mouth. We’re delighted to partner with Accel on building out our vision to become the active reliability platform for DevOps teams.”
Nolet’s co-founders are Hannes Lenke, who founded TestObject (which was later acquired by Sauce Labs), and Timo Euteneuer, who was previously Director Sales EMEA at Sauce Labs.
Tthe company says that it currently has about 125 paying customers who run about 1 million checks per day on its platform. Pricing for its services starts at $7 per month for individual developers, with plans for small teams starting at $29 per month.
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Continuous delivery pioneer CircleCI scores $100M Series E
CircleCI, an early adherent to the notion of continuous delivery when it launched in 2011, announced a $100 million Series E investment today. It comes on top of a $56 million round last July.
The round was led by IVP and Sapphire Ventures . Under the terms of the deal, Cack Wilhelm will be joining the CircleCI board. Jai Das from Sapphire will also be joining the board as an observer.
Today’s investment brings the total raised to $215 million, according to the company, with $156 million coming over the last 8 months. The company did not want to discuss its current valuation.
Circle CI CEO Jim Rose says with so much uncertainty because of COVID-19 he welcomes not only the money, but the quality of the firms and people involved in the investment.
“We’re really excited to get both IVP and Sapphire because they’ve seen all of it all the way through public and beyond. Given all of the nuttiness over the last few months obviously having cash on the balance sheet is extremely helpful, but the other part, too is that this a time when you want to have more brains around the table, not fewer. And so being able to get people to help out and just think about the problems that we’re encountering right now is really helpful,” Rose told TechCrunch .
Rose recognizes the huge challenge everyone is facing, but he sees this switch to remote workforces really driving the need for more automation, something his company is in a position to help DevOps teams with.
“What we’ve seen from a DevOps perspective is that this forced migration to remote-only for so many organizations has really driven the urgency for more automation in the DevOps pipeline,” he said.
He said this has led to a huge surge in usage on the platform in recent weeks, and today’s investment will at least partly go towards making sure there are enough resources in place to keep the platform stable whatever comes.
“When we think about money and we think about where we’re investing in the near term, we’re investing a lot in making sure that the platform is stable and available and supporting all of our customers as they go through this. You know this is a difficult time, a difficult transition and we’re trying to make sure that we’re doing everything we can to support our customers through that process,” Rose said.
Many companies at this stage of startup maturity begin to look ahead to an IPO, but Rose isn’t ready to discuss that, especially in the current economic climate. “We’re going to have to get folks to some kind of liquidity at some point, but I think right now our focus is on really investing in the platform and investing in our customers and then we’ll let the market clear out and figure out what the new normal looks like,” he said.
The company would consider making some acquisitions with its base of capital if the right opportunity came along. “We’re always evaluating and always looking around. One of the interesting things about our space is that it’s flooded with new and innovative approaches to point problems. There are a lot of companies that are interesting, so we’re definitely always looking around,” he said.
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Cloud Foundry Foundation executive director Abby Kearns steps down to pursue a new executive role elsewhere
The Cloud Foundry Foundation (CFF), the home of the Cloud Foundry open-source developer platform, today announced that its executive director Abby Kearns is stepping down from her role to pursue an executive role elsewhere.
If you’ve followed the development of the CFF for a while, it won’t come as a surprise that its current CTO, Chip Childers, is stepping into the executive director role. For the last few years, Kearns and Childers shared duties hosting the foundation’s bi-annual conferences and were essentially the public faces of the organization.
Both Kearns and Childers stepped into their roles in 2016 after CFF founding CEO Sam Ramji departed the organization for a role at Google . Before joining the Cloud Foundry Foundation, Kearns worked on Pivotal Cloud Foundry and spent over eight years as head of product management for integration services at Verizon (which, full disclosure, is also the corporate parent of TechCrunch).
Today, according to its own data, the Linux Foundation-based Cloud Foundry project is used by more than half the Fortune 500 enterprises. And while some use the open-source code to run and manage their own Cloud Foundry platforms, most work with a partner like the now VMware-owned Pivotal.
“I am tremendously proud of Cloud Foundry and of the Foundation we have all built together,” said Kearns in today’s announcement. “Cloud Foundry offers the premier developer experience for the cloud native landscape and has seen massive adoption in the enterprise. It also has one of the strongest, kindest, most diverse communities (and staff) in open source. I leave the organization in the best hands possible. Chip was the first Foundation staff member and has served as CTO for more than four years. There is literally nobody else in the world more qualified for this job.”
During her role as executive director, Kearns helped shepherd the project through a number of changes. The most important of those was surely the rise of Kubernetes and containers in general, which quickly changed the DevOps landscape. Unlike other organizations, the CFF adapted to these changing times and started integrating these new technologies. Over the course of the last two years, the Cloud Foundry community started to deeply integrate these cloud-native technologies into its own platform, despite the fact that the community had already built its own container orchestration system in the past.
As Childers told me last year, though, the point of Cloud Foundry isn’t any specific technology, though. Instead, it’s about the developer experience. Ideally, the developers who use it don’t have to care about the underlying infrastructure and can simply integrate it into their DevOps workflow. With a lot of the recent technical changes behind it,
“We as a Foundation are turning the page to a new chapter; raising the profiles of our technical contributors, highlighting the community’s accomplishments and redefining the Cloud Foundry platform as the best Kubernetes experience for enterprise developers,” said Childers today. “Abby has done a tremendous job leading the Foundation through a period of massive growth and upheaval in the cloud native world. Her leadership was instrumental in building Cloud Foundry as a leading cloud development tool.”
As the CFF also today announced, Paul Fazzone, SVP Tanzu R&D at VMware, has been named Chairman of the Board of Directors, where he replaces Dell EMC global CTO John Roese.
“This next chapter for Cloud Foundry will be a shift forward in focusing on evolving the technology to a Kubernetes-based platform and supporting the diverse set of contributors who will make that outcome possible,” said Fazzone. “In my new role as Chairman of the Board, I look forward to helping guide the Foundation toward its goal of expanding and bolstering the ecosystem, its community and its core of users.”
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Humio announces $20M Series B to advance unlimited logging tool
Humio, a startup that has built a modern unlimited logging solution, announced a $20 million Series B investment today.
Dell Technologies Capital led the round with participation from previous investor Accel. Today’s investment brings the total raised to $32 million, according to the company.
Humio co-founder and CEO Geeta Schmidt says the startup wanted to build a solution that would allow companies to log everything, while reducing the overall cost associated with doing that, a tough problem due to the resource and data volume involved. The company deals with customers who are processing multiple terabytes of data per day.
“We really wanted to build an infrastructure where it’s easy to log everything and answer anything in real time. So we built an index-free logging solution which allows you to ask […] ad hoc questions over large volumes of data,” Schmidt told TechCrunch.
They are able to ingest so much data by using streaming technology, says company EVP of sales Morten Gram. “We have this real time streaming engine that makes it possible for customers to monitor whatever they know they want to be looking at. So they can build dashboards and alerts for these [metrics] that will be running in real time,” Gram explained.
What’s more, because the solution enables companies to log everything, rather than pick and choose what to log, they can ask questions about things they might not know, such as an on-going security incident or a major outage, and trace the answer from the data in the logs as the incident is happening.
Perhaps more importantly, the company has come up with technology to reduce the cost associated with processing and storing such high volumes of data. “We have thought a lot about trying to do a lot more with a lot less resources. And so, for example, one of our customers, who moved from a competitor, has gone from 80 servers to 14 doing the same volumes of data,” she said.
Deepak Jeevankumar, managing director and lead investor at Dell Technologies Capital, says that his firm recognized that Humio was solving these issues in a creative and modern way.
“Humio’s team has created a new log analysis architecture for the microservices age. This can support real-time analysis at full-speed ingest, while decreasing cost of storage and analysis by at least an order of magnitude,” he explained. “In a short-period of time, Humio has won the confidence of many Fortune 500 customers who have shifted their log platforms to Humio from legacy, decade-old architectures that do not scale for the cloud world.”
The company’s customers include Netlify, Bloomberg, HP Aruba and Michigan State University. It offers on-prem, cloud and hosted SaaS products. Today, the company also announced it was introducing an unlimited ingest plan for hosted SaaS customers.
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Mirantis co-founder launches FreedomFi to bring private LTE networks to enterprises
Boris Renski, the co-founder of Mirantis, one of the earliest and best-funded players in the OpenStack space a few years ago (which then mostly pivoted to Kubernetes and DevOps), has left his role as CMO to focus his efforts on a new startup: FreedomFi. The new company brings together open-source hardware and software to give enterprises a new way to leverage the newly opened 3.5 GHz band for private LTE and — later — 5G IoT deployments.
“There is a very broad opportunity for any enterprise building IoT solutions, which completely changes the dynamic of the whole market,” Renski told me when I asked him why he was leaving Mirantis. “This makes the whole space very interesting and fast-evolving. I felt that my background in open source and my existing understanding of the open-source landscape and the LTE space […] is an extremely compelling opportunity to dive into headfirst.”
Renski told me that a lot of the work the company is doing is still in its early stages, but the company recently hit a milestone when it used its prototype stack to send messages across its private network over a distance of around 2.7 miles.
Mirantis itself worked on bringing Magma, a Facebook-developed open-source tool for powering some of the features needed for building access networks, into production. FreedomFi is also working with the OpenAirInterface consortium, which aims to create an ecosystem for open-source software and hardware development around wireless innovation. Most, if not all, of the technology the company will develop over time will also be open source, as well.
Renski, of course, gets to leverage his existing connections in the enterprise and telco industry with this new venture, but he also told me that he plans to leverage the Mirantis playbook as he builds out the company.
“At Mirantis, our journey was that we started with basically offering end-to-end open-source cloud buildouts to a variety of enterprises back when OpenStack was essentially the only open-source cloud project out there,” he explained. “And we spent a whole bunch of time doing that, engaging with customers, getting customer revenue, learning where the bottlenecks are — and then kind of gradually evolving into more of a leveraged business model with a subscription offering around OpenStack and then MCP and now Kubernetes, Docker, etc. But the key was to be very kind of customer-centric, go get some customer wins first, give customers a services-centric offering that gets them to the result, and then figure out where the leveraged business model opportunities are.”
Currently, enterprises that want to attempt to build their own private LTE networks — and are willing to spend millions on it — have to go to the large telecom providers. Those companies, though, aren’t necessarily interested in working on these relatively small deployments (or at least “small” by the standards of a telco).
Renski and his team started the project about two months ago and for now, it remains self-funded. But the company already has five pilots lined up, including one with a company that produces large-scale events and another with a large real estate owner, and with some of the tech falling in place, Renski seems optimistic that this is a project worth focusing on. There are still some hurdles to overcome and Renski tells me the team is learning new things every day. The hardware, for example, remains hard to source and the software stack remains in flux. “We’re probably at least six months away from having solved all of the technology and business-related problems pertaining to delivering this kind of end-to-end private LTE network,” he said.
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Datree announces $8M Series A as it joins Y Combinator
Datree, the early-stage startup building a DevOps policy engine on GitHub, announced an $8 million Series A today. It also announced it has joined the Y Combinator Winter 20 cohort.
Blumberg and TLV Partners led the round with participation from Y Combinator . The company has now raised $11 million with the $3 million seed round announced in 2018.
Since that seed round, company co-founder and CEO Shimon Tolts says that the company learned that while scanning code for issues was something DevOps teams found useful, they wanted help defining the rules. So Datree has created a series of rules packages you can run against the code to find any gaps or issues.
“We offer development best practices, coding standards and security and compliance policies. What happens today is that, as you connect to Datree, we connect to your source code and scan the entire code base, and we recommend development best practices based on your technology stack,” Tolts explained.
He says that they build these rules packages based on the company’s own expertise, as well as getting help from the community, and in some cases partnering with experts. For its Docker security package, it teamed up with Aqua Security.
The focus remains on applying these rules in GitHub where developers are working. Before committing the code, they can run the appropriate rules packages against it to ensure they are in compliance with best practices.
Datree rules packages. Screenshot: Datree
Tolts says they began looking at Y Combinator after the seed round because they wanted more guidance on building out the business. “We knew that Y Combinator could really help us because our product is relevant to 95 percent of all YC companies, and the program has helped us go and work on six figure deals with more mature YC companies,” he said.
Datree is working directly with Y Combinator CEO Michael Seibel, and he says being part of the Winter 20 cohort has helped him refine his go-to-market motion. He admits he is not a typical YC company having been around since 2017 with an existing product and 12 employees, but he thinks it will help propel the company in the long run.
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Where top VCs are investing in open source and dev tools (Part 2 of 2)
In part two of a survey that asks top VCs about exciting opportunities in open source and dev tools, we dig into responses from 10 leading open-source-focused investors at firms that span early to growth stage across software-specific firms, corporate venture arms and prominent generalist firms.
In the conclusion to our survey, we’ll hear from:
- Gaurav Gupta, Lightspeed Venture Partners
- Julia Schottenstein, New Enterprise Associates (NEA)
- Peter Sonsini, New Enterprise Associates (NEA)
- Salil Deshpande, Uncorrelated Ventures
- Ethan Kurzweil, Bessemer Venture Partners
- Sakib Dadi, Bessemer Venture Partners
- Jenny Gao, Bessemer Venture Partners
- Mike Droesch, Bessemer Venture Partners
- Lonne Jaffe, Insight Venture Partners
- Jai Das, Sapphire Ventures
These responses have been edited for clarity and length.
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Where top VCs are investing in open source and dev tools (Part 1 of 2)
The once-polarizing world of open-source software has recently become one of the hotter destinations for VCs.
As the popularity of open source increases among organizations and developers, startups in the space have reached new heights and monstrous valuations.
Over the past several years, we’ve seen surging open-source companies like Databricks reach unicorn status, as well as VCs who cashed out behind a serious number of exits involving open-source and dev tool companies, deals like IBM’s Red Hat acquisition or Elastic’s late-2018 IPO. Last year, the exit spree continued with transactions like F5 Networks’ acquisition of NGINX and a number of high-profile acquisitions from mainstays like Microsoft and GitHub.
Similarly, venture investment in new startups in the space has continued to swell. More investors are taking shots at finding the next big payout, with annual invested capital in open-source and dev tool startups increasing at a roughly 10% compounded annual growth rate (CAGR) over the last five years, according to data from Crunchbase. Furthermore, attractive returns in the space seem to be adding more fuel to the fire, as open-source and dev tool startups saw more than $2 billion invested in the space in 2019 alone, per Crunchbase data.
As we close out another strong year for innovation and venture investing in the sector, we asked 18 of the top open-source-focused VCs who work at firms spanning early to growth stages to share what’s exciting them most and where they see opportunities. For purposes of length and clarity, responses have been edited and split (in no particular order) into part one and part two of this survey. In part one of our survey, we hear from:
- Vas Natarajan, Accel
- Stephanie Zhan, Sequoia Capital
- Tomasz Tunguz, Redpoint Ventures
- Deepak Jeevankumar, Dell Technologies Capital
- Anna Khan, CRV
- Peter Levine, Andreessen Horowitz
- Ilya Kirnos, SignalFire
- S. Somasegar, Madrona Ventures
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