PagerDuty, a 5-year old IT incidents management startup, announced $27.2M in Series B funding today led by Bessemer Venture Partners with help from early round investors Andreessen Horowitz and Baseline Metal. The Series B money brings the total money raised to date to $39.8M. As part of the deal, Trevor Oelschig, a partner at Bessemer Venture Partners, will join PagerDuty’s board of directors.
The money was a huge financial boost for the cloud-based startup, which up until now had raised $1.9M in 2010 in its seed round, then an additional $10.7M in Series A funding in January, 2013.
Alex Solomon, co-founder and CEO of PagerDuty says the company name stems from IT folks who are on call over night to take care of any problems that pop up on the company IT systems. Even today, many IT pros work with pagers and get beeped when there’s a problem, hence the company name.
PagerDuty allows companies to pull all of their incident reporting tools into a single interface and send an alert when an incident occurs. That’s where they are today, but Solomon says the plan is to use the money to expand the product in a big way by not only reporting incidents, and bringing in an IT pro as quickly as possible to solve major problems, but also to give more intelligence to the incident report and even offer ways to resolve it or fix it automatically without intervention from a sleepy human in the middle of the night.
He says that, too often in the past, reporting tools have given reports of something wrong, when it was really minor or nothing at all, and they are aiming to minimize those false-positives to the extent possible, so that individuals on pager duty are not pulled in unless there is something seriously wrong.
While this might sound like what New Relic, AppDynamics or Splunk is doing already, Solomon says it’s different because these companies are  looking at the application performance layer and their products plug into PagerDuty, which can look at the entire IT infrastructure incident reporting picture, regardless of the system doing the reporting.
He says, it also works with tools like ScienceLogic, which provides insight into IT management, whether the tool is in the cloud or in a private data center. ScienceLogic also uses a similar plug-in kind of architecture to monitor these systems, but Solomon says the difference is while ScienceLogic is monitoring these systems, it only passes information to PagerDuty when something happens, an incident occurs that requires the attention of an IT pro.
That’s because PagerDuty is designed to pull in these incidents across systems to be a central reporting hub.
Solomon says before a product like PagerDuty came along, companies tended to cobble together their own incident management programs. What his company allows them to do is plug in whatever monitoring systems they are using and manage the incident reporting from a single interface.
All of these tools represent a category of tool designed to simplify the life of IT managers. They are aiming at different parts of the stack, but they are designed to give visibility into the health of the company IT assets.
PagerDuty says it’s gaining traction across a variety of verticals including 30 percent of the Fortune 100. Their customers include Nike, Adobe, Intuit, Panasonic and Evernote among others.
Solomon says the primary objective with the new money will be to invest aggressively in product development and engineering and product management and scale up the team, which currently has 90 employees with headquarters in San Francisco and a programming office in Toronto.
“We have a huge vision of building new category. That takes a lot of work, a lot of moving parts and different components,” he explained.
PHOTO CREDIT: (c) Can Stock Photo
