Rootly, the leading enterprise-grade incident management platform, has recently announced the successful completion of a $12 million Series A funding round. Renegade Partners led the investment, with participation from Google Gradient Ventures and XYZ Ventures. This funding round brings Rootly’s total funding to $15.2 million ($20 million CAD). The company intends to use the funds to accelerate their product roadmap, expand their global engineering presence, and invest in sales and marketing to meet the growing demand for their solution.
The timing of Rootly’s latest funding is particularly significant, as it was finalized on the heels of the collapse of Silicon Valley Bank. This event, considered one of the darkest days for the tech startup and venture capital communities, created significant chaos and uncertainty. Despite these challenging circumstances, Rootly successfully secured the funding, which highlights the strength and appeal of their incident management solution. Roseanne Wincek, Co-founder and Managing Director at Renegade Partners, praised Rootly’s ability to secure the deal in such trying times, citing their world-class team, strong business fundamentals, sustained growth, and ability to meet a critical need for engineering teams.
The founders of Rootly, JJ Tang and Quentin Rousseau, first met at Instacart, where they both experienced the urgent need for a better incident response management system. Tang, who was responsible for enterprise product management, witnessed Instacart losing millions of dollars in orders due to outages, causing frustration among customers and retailers. Rousseau, as Instacart’s first site reliability engineer (SRE), recognized the growing complexity of IT systems and the need for a more efficient incident management solution. Their shared experiences led them to create Rootly, a platform that automates incident management, providing immediate context on previous incidents, streamlining communication, and offering a scalable solution for any company.
The demand for incident management solutions has grown exponentially due to the increasing complexity of IT systems and the shift towards remote work. Even a single minute of downtime can cost companies significant amounts of money, with estimates reaching $16,700 ($1 million per hour). Additionally, the reputational costs associated with downtime are immeasurable. To address this, Google introduced the concept of Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) in 2003, revolutionizing software team approaches to driving reliability. Now, in 2023, Google Gradient Ventures and other investors are betting on Rootly as the platform that will transform the incident management landscape for years to come.
Among Rootly’s satisfied customers is Tripadvisor, whose Manager of Technical Operations, Geoff Powell, praised Rootly as an essential part of their incident response process. Powell explained that Rootly has enabled their team to spend more time on issue resolution and less time on manual administrative work. As a result, they have significantly reduced resolution times and the number of repeat incidents, making Rootly one of their best IT investments in terms of ROI.
What sets Rootly apart from other incident management tools is its ability to automate the entire incident management and resolution process. Rootly utilizes cutting-edge technology to coordinate the right responders, suggest guided next steps, and make proactive recommendations for preventing future incidents. By leveraging AI and machine learning, Rootly can identify related incidents, automate status updates and retrospective/postmortem generation, ultimately saving time and preventing future incidents.
CEO JJ Tang is excited about the positive feedback from customers and is confident that Rootly is just getting started. With their focus on innovation, Tang believes that Rootly will continue to bring transformative change to the incident management space, helping companies mitigate and prevent incidents effectively.
Rootly has established itself as the leading enterprise-grade incident management platform, proven to accelerate incident resolution times by 80 percent or more. With a simple and configurable platform, Rootly automates manual administrative work, such as paging responders, incident creation, tracking action items and metrics, stakeholder communication, and generating retrospectives. The platform’s AI-powered capabilities continuously learn and help companies understand the root causes of incidents to prevent them in the future. Rootly already boasts an impressive client base, including Canva, NVIDIA, and Tripadvisor.
As the demand for incident management solutions continues to rise, Rootly appears well-positioned to meet the needs of companies worldwide. With their recent funding round and a strong focus on innovation, Rootly is poised to make a significant impact in the incident management industry, revolutionizing the way organizations handle incidents and ensure seamless operations.