Rootly Secures A $3.2 Million Seed Round To Build An SRE Incident Management Solution Inside Slack
Rootly secures a $3.2 million seed round to build an SRE incident management solution inside Slack
While businesses seek ways to respond to incidents in their complex microservices-driven software stacks, SREs — site reliability engineers — are left to deal with the issues associated with making everything work and keeping the application up and running. Rootly, a new early-stage startup, is attempting to assist by developing an incident response solution for Slack.
Today, the company emerged from stealth with a seed investment of $3.2 million. The round was led by XYZ Venture Capital, with participation from 8VC, Y Combinator, and several individual technology executives.
Quentin Rousseau, co-founder and CEO of Rootly, says he began his SRE career at Instacart. When he joined the company in 2015, it was processing hundreds of orders per day; by the time he left in 2018, it had grown to thousands. It was his responsibility to ensure that the app remained operational for shoppers, consumers, and stores as it scaled.
He stated that while at Instacart, he developed an eye for patterns in how people responded to issues and began working on a side project after he left to bring the incident response process within Slack under control. He connected with co-founder JJ Tang, who joined Instacart following Rousseau's departure in 2018, and the two decided to launch Rootly to address the unique challenges that SREs face when it comes to incident response.
Simplicity in Complexity
“In essence, we want to enable people to manage and resolve incidents directly within Slack. We do not wish to add another layer of complexity. We believe that there are already a plethora of tools available, and when things are chaotic and on fire, you really want to focus on the resolution aspect of the situation. As a result, we're putting a premium on the Slack experience," Rousseau explained.
The Rootly solution enables SREs to quickly connect to their various tools within Slack, whether they are Jira, Zendesk, DataDog, or PagerDuty, and it automatically generates an incident report based on the conversation taking place within Slack about resolving the incident. This will assist when the team meets for an incident post-mortem following the resolution of the issue.
The company is currently small, with fewer than ten employees, but it intends to hire engineers and sales personnel over the next year as they put this capital to work.
Tang notes that they have incorporated diversity into the company's culture, which is aided by their collaboration with investor Ross Fubini, managing partner at lead investor XYZ Venture Capital. “That is also why we chose Ross as our lead investor. [His firm] probably has one of the most intense concentrations on [diversity], not just as a fund, but also in terms of how they influence their portfolio companies,” he explained.
According to Fubini, there are two primary objectives when it comes to building diverse companies: first, developing a system for identifying diverse pools of talent, and second, creating an environment that makes people from underrepresented groups feel welcome once hired.
“One of our early conversations with Rootly was about how to both attract and benefit from a diverse group of people, and what will both attract them and make them feel at home,” Fubini explained.
The company is currently entirely remote, with Rousseau based in San Francisco and Tang based in Toronto, and the intention is to remain so until offices can fully reopen. It's worth noting that Rousseau and Tang are current Y Combinator cohort members.
