Rookout Announced Launch and $4.2M Funding

A few days ago we announced Rookout’s official launch and $4.2 million in funding by TLV Partners and Emerge. Obviously, this is a very important milestone in the company’s life and a great moment for us to stop and reflect on the road we have traveled so far.

From humble cyber beginnings

When Liran and I embarked on this journey back in 2016, after many years of working in cybersecurity, we knew we wanted to do something new and impactful, while leveraging our low-level engineering experience. Devops was a clear choice for us, since as developers, we were excited about solving our own problems and working with great likeminded people. We set a goal to make life (and specifically the lives of software developers) better, while creating a thriving business that delivers real business value to our clients.

Nir Eyal, the author of Hooked, says that there are two things you should ask yourself when starting a business: “Do you believe that you’re materially improving people’s lives?” and “Are you the user?” Being able to answer both of those questions with a “yes” measurably increases your chances of success. With that understanding and passion, our journey began.

What (de)bugged us?

We started with debugging code in production — our own pain point as developers, focusing in particular on the absurdity of having to spend hours of work to gain insights into our own servers. “It’s our server, our code, our application – why can’t we just click a button to get at our data?!” This inability becomes painfully clear when things break or fail. And as the pace and complexity of software development increases, so does the pain.

We envisioned a day when the tedious process of collecting data from live code would be easy, and accomplished with just a few clicks. Best of all, we envisioned a process that requires no pre-planning (instrumentation) and is fully decoupled from ongoing deployment processes.

How would this look? You’d no longer have to write additional dedicated code, stop your app, re-deploy, and restart the app — only to discover that you still don’t have the data you need, and have to start the process again. To be fair, on the rare occasion you actually get the right data on the first try. But as a developer – how I wish it was a more common scenario!

How Rookout helps dev teams?

We spent months talking to like-minded developers, exploring what would help them most in their day-to-day lives. That’s how we chose to focus on two aspects of the same challenge: On the one hand, the ability to collect any type of data on-demand. And on the other, the ability to see and leverage that data in the wide range of destinations that developers use.

Some people choose to send more granular data to their APMs, log aggregation, or exception management systems, while others opt to send it to alerting tools or to their database. We decided that our solution should be agile enough to support all these requests.

We quickly realized that we’d be embarking on wonderful friendships between us and the many other players in our ecosystem which help DevOps and Dev teams do their jobs better.

The most important step a dev can take

While we’ve already come far, these are still just the first steps of our journey. Some of our research and hard work has already paid off, and the dozens of companies that were willing to join us in stealth mode are seeing real value. Yet we still have a long row to hoe.

With the support of our wonderful investors at TLV Partners and Emerge, our great advisors, and our awesome, constantly growing team we plan to continue taking the most important steps each of us can take – the next one.

There are many more great things to come at Rookout. I invite you to join our journey!