CtrlStack, the industry’s first DevOps observability platform to leverage a causal graph, was secretly funded today with $5.2 million in seed funding co-led by Sequoia Capital and Engineering Capital with participation from Kearny Jackson, Webb Investment Network and Lightspeed launched. Dev Nag leads the company as CEO and Founder. Dev is no stranger to the world of IT monitoring and analytics, having previously been the founder and CTO of Wavefront, a leading observability company acquired by VMware. He holds more than a dozen patents in the areas of machine learning, observability, and security. Now Dev and the team at CtrlStack are creating a unified experience for overcoming the challenges of troubleshooting complex, distributed systems.
Enterprises are under unprecedented pressure to deliver digital services and applications faster than ever before. How well an application performs in production depends on a combination of code, infrastructure, and operations. When an incident occurs, teams need to quickly determine whether the issue is related to code, infrastructure, or operational activities, or a combination of these changes. However, current approaches to resolving complex problems remain complicated, manual and fragmented – it still takes organizations hours or days to mitigate and resolve incidents and outages. A recent DEJ report found that 76% of all performance issues can ultimately be traced back to changes in the environment, and 66% of MTTR is spent identifying changes that are causing a problem.
CtrlStack’s mission is to simplify real-time troubleshooting and empower DevOps teams to embrace change without fear of failed deployments. With its ability to trace system changes and relationships across the stack, CtrlStack provides the only observability solution that connects cause and effect, forming a knowledge graph of the entire infrastructure, interconnected services, and the impact of changes. “The monitoring and observability space still relies heavily on human-driven workflows and fragmented data, which is unsustainable given the complexity and constant change in DevOps environments,” said Dev Nag, CEO of CtrlStack. “We need to rethink how we practice observability so teams can fix bugs in real time, not hours or days. With CtrlStack, building the data connections is just the first step in leveraging machine learning and generative AI to automate operations.”
Bill Coughran, Partner at Sequoia Capital said, “A flawless digital experience is now the foundation for any business to remain competitive. Dev and the CtrlStack team have completely changed the game for developers by making the monitoring and observability process simple and efficient, eliminating timely guesswork and resulting in faster MTTR. We look forward to working with them and seeing their vision for the next-gen observability stack come to life.”
Ashmeet Sidana, Partner at Engineering Capital, said, “Dev has a unique technical understanding that has enabled CtrlStack to take a graph-based approach to monitoring the flow of data across the enterprise and understanding the impact of changes across the stack when operating becomes more complex. This level of visibility is the first of its kind. We believe the company’s platform – and real-time troubleshooting application – has the potential to transform the observability market.”
