How our $5MM Series A has changed our team, product, and brand
Letter from David Gildeh, CEO & Co-founder
Software architecture is moving towards complexity at a speed we had a hard time envisioning when we founded Dataloop.IO in 2013. Products having fifty million deployments a year is no longer sci-fi. With the advent of DevOps and microservices supporting such scale, engineering orgs are faced with the task of making sure that hundreds of processes and services stay up and talk to each other while continuously deploying new ones.
One thing we were right about: monitoring the back-end infrastructure must change just as dramatically to support this new reality. It is mind-bogglingly cumbersome and inefficient to have a monitoring sprawl, with siloed ops teams bearing the burden of monitoring across all technologies. We knew this because we had been in those shoes before. And so, we decided to make a different monitoring solution.
To this day, we are the only monitoring platform that empowers both operations and developers to implement monitoring in a self-service fashion, while standardizing it into one cohesive platform. We enable self-sufficiency, visibility and collaboration.
In June 2016, we quietly raised $5MM to invest in this next generation of self-service infrastructure monitoring. With the fundamental objectives of helping us improve and communicate our monitoring platform to DevOps around the world, we’ve made investments in three key areas: our team, our product, and our brand.
What we’ve accomplished:
New team
- To build more features and make the product faster and better, we doubled our London-based engineering team
- To bring our product to market we invested in our customer engine of marketing, sales, and success in Boston, Philadelphia, and San Francisco
New features
- Events and dashboard annotations
- Auto-discovery of services with custom integrations
- Prometheus support
- A deeper, easier AWS integration
- Operational analytics via our new Metrics Browser
And finally, a new brand: Outlyer
Why the change? The challenge of not having a “.com” for Dataloop.IO made it harder for our community to discover our platform. The words Data + Loop sounded too similar to an incumbent competitor (and a surprising number of other companies called DataSomething).
And while “Dataloop” physically described what we do, it didn’t fit with who we are as a team, our product, or our voice. It also didn’t reflect the way we want our customers to feel when they succeed in setting up best-in-class monitoring.
We are Outliers
Datapoints and people that are significantly different from others.
The more we said it, the more it rang true: Outlier.
And of course, given that every normally-spelled .com domain name is taken, Outlyer was born.
And as such, we want you, our customers, to become Outlyers by providing you more than just another monitoring tool—but rather a platform enabling your teams to make real-time, data-driven decisions that have an impact in building software for your customers.
It’s been a big year for us at Dataloop.IO Outlyer and there’s more to come in 2017.
We couldn’t have achieved this without our amazing customers, our investors, and the Outlyer family across the US and UK.
Thank you for the continued privilege and opportunity to bring our DevOps monitoring vision to life. We hope you enjoy being an Outlyer too.
Cheers,
David Gildeh, CEO and Co-founder of Outlyer (formerly known as Dataloop.IO)