Rootly Raises $3.2 Million to Help Companies Rapidly Recover From Technical Incidents

Rootly Raises $3.2 Million to Help Companies Rapidly Recover From Technical Incidents

Company solves critical enterprise issue, saves companies millions of dollars in lost revenue and developer time

Rootly draws investments from XYZ Venture Capital, 8VC, Y Combinator and C-Suite executives at companies like Dropbox, GitHub and Instacart

Rootly, the new technical incident management platform and Slackbot, launched today to address one of the biggest problems enterprises face: resolving incidents like critical outages quickly and painlessly. The company also announced that it closed $3.2 million in seed funding from XYZ Venture Capital, 8VC and Y Combinator. Individual investors, including Bart Mediratta, former CTO of Dropbox; Jason Warner, CTO of GitHub; John Lilly, former partner at Greylock Partners; and Max Mullen, co-founder of Instacart, also participated. Funds will be used to expand the Rootly team and accelerate product development as the company continues to add innovative features and extend its product suite.

Rootly’s incident management platform and Slackbot are designed to help companies resolve incidents faster by automating manual admin tasks and providing insight to prevent them in the future. This has become increasingly important in 2021. Companies such as Slack, Robinhood and most recently Fastly have experienced headline-grabbing outages, demonstrating that no company is immune to chaotic, manual and expensive incidents. 

“The problems companies experience have been exacerbated over the past 18 months as teams have gone remote. Not only have incidents become harder to resolve, but engineers are trying to fix issues in less than optimal conditions. For example, they can no longer gather in physical war rooms that mask over poor tooling,” said Quentin Rousseau, co-founder and CEO of Rootly. “On top of this, system complexity has grown as companies shift towards cloud-native, microservices and depend further on third party services. It is unlikely for one person to possess all of the tribal knowledge required to fix the problem, and anyone who does probably is not going to be available to help in the moment of need. Rootly offers a better way so developers can focus on what they do best, putting out the fire.”

Downtime costs an average +$300,000/hr. Despite the pervasiveness of the problem and a projected $22.3 billion-plus total addressable market (TAM), there are no real solutions. Companies invest lots in tools such as Datadog and PagerDuty, to alert them when something is wrong, but they still need help orchestrating the response and resolution. Additionally, existing solutions often can’t provide relevant insights to prevent a recurrence of the problem. Instead, engineers are tasked with memorizing and trying to follow manual processes while under immense pressure to get an incident fixed. They have to rely on fragmented tools that hinder collaboration. This prolongs incident resolution, enables incidents to repeat and drains developer productivity.

Bringing Structure to Chaotic Incidents

With Rootly, an alert is generated from PagerDuty or customer support and an incident is declared. The Rootly platform then allows team members to respond, communicate and quickly resolve the incident directly from Slack. Once the problem is fixed, Rootly provides retrospectives and actionable insights to keep similar incidents from happening in the future.

“If you use PagerDuty and don’t also have Rootly, you are leaving thousands of developer productivity hours on the table,” said Ross Fubini, managing partner at XYZ Venture Capital. “This team understands the problem at a very practical level; they know where all the pain points are. Rootly’s elegant solution eliminates the need for any company to try to build something similar in-house. No one can do it better.”

In contrast to in-house solutions that take multiple quarters to build and require constant maintenance, Rootly can be implemented in under five minutes. Companies are freed to focus on their core competencies.

Uniquely Positioned to Solve Incidents at Scale

The Rootly team has been able to successfully tackle the incident recovery problem thanks to the founders’ uniquely suited backgrounds. Quentin was an early Site Reliability Engineer at Instacart who built much of the foundations for Instacart’s system, which went from handling thousands of orders a week to millions, reliably. Co-founder and COO JJ Tang applied his own set of best practices after leading on the product side of Instacart as the company experienced exponential growth over the course of the pandemic. Together, they developed an automated solution capable of seamlessly scaling with the world’s fastest growing companies.