DevOps funding

Today, developers are responsible for their app’s reliability, from development, through quality assurance and testing to production. In addition, they are increasingly interested in "active monitoring", that is getting better visibility into their applications before any problems appear in production, an area that’s traditionally been the operations team’s responsibility. When combined, the testing and active monitoring markets are worth more than $1 billion, however, while the lines between the two are blurring, their toolsets are very different.

Checkly’s vision is to unite end-to-end testing and active monitoring in order to be the number one active reliability platform for modern DevOps teams. It’s laser-focused on end-to-end reliability and will serve cross-functional DevOps teams and support a modern technical stack based on JavaScript and Open Source. It’s building a developer-first solution that’s easy to get started with and seamlessly integrates into the development workflow.

Tim Nolet, previously co-founder of Vamp.io, founded Checkly in 2018 after experiencing his own frustrations with the limitations of existing monitoring tools. Hannes Lenke, who founded TestObject (acquired by Sauce Labs), and Timo Euteneuer, who was previously Director Sales EMEA at Sauce Labs, have joined as co-founders.

Tim said: “As a customer in the monitoring market, I thought it had long been stuck in the 90s and I needed a tool that could support teams in JavaScript and work for all the different roles within a DevOps team. I set out to build it, quickly realizing that testing was equally important to address.

“At Checkly, we’ve created a market-defining tool that our customers have been demanding, and we’ve already seen strong traction through word of mouth. We’re delighted to partner with Accel on building out our vision to become the active reliability platform for DevOps teams.”

Today, Checkly is a SaaS platform used by DevOps teams to monitor their APIs and web applications. It uses Google's Puppeteer framework to test software, representing a seismic change in how people run tests and monitoring for their web apps. Checkly’s open source tool Puppeteer Recorder is now the de-facto standard low-code tool for creating end-to-end testing scripts. Built-in as a Chrome extension, it has already proven extremely popular, with over 18,000 users and 6.7k GitHub stars.

Checkly has been bootstrapped to date and has already attracted over 125 paying inbound customers globally, running nearly 1 million checks per day on the Checkly platform. Amongst the users are cutting-edge technology teams at companies such as Vercel and log management platform Humio. With this seed round, Checkly aims to build out its active reliability platform, adding more customers and preparing for eventual global expansion.

Guillermo Rauch, CEO of Vercel, had this to say on the impact of Checkly’s platform for Vercel: “All our software depends on Checkly. It's part of our development workflow to build Vercel.com. It consolidates all our reliability needs in one tool and provides the right level of insights for our team.”