Server Density, The Server Monitoring SaaS, Raises $1.5M For Further U.S. Expansion

It’s been a while since we heard from Server Density, the UK.-based SaaS server monitoring startup, but sometimes that’s the nature of quietly going about building a business. Today, however, the largely bootstrapped company is disclosing that it has raised $1.5 million in seed funding led by SP Ventures.

Prior to this, Server Density had raised €50k from Seedcamp and then angel funding from the likes of Christoph Janz, Dick Williams, Qamar Aziz, each of whom also participated in this round.

The startup plans to use the new capital for further U.S. expansion. Meanwhile, Oren Michaels, previously co-founder and CEO of Mashery, has joined its board of directors.

Founded in 2009 by school friends David Mytton and Harry Wincup, Server Density provides a Software-as-a-Service to help companies run and monitor their server infrastructure. It syncs with major cloud providers to monitor websites and servers from a single console, API and mobile app, thus offering the ability to diagnose problems and maintain uptime and server performance. It works both on-premise and via the cloud.

The company makes money by charging a monthly fee based on the number of systems monitored. In terms of traction, Server Density claims to monitor over 300TB of data per month for its 1000+ customers. Specifically, it says it will be investing in key product areas such as enhancing its big data analytics function to “leverage the billions of metrics data it collects daily.”

Co-founder David Mytton tells me that the company’s clients include the U.K.’s National Health Service (NHS), for whom it monitors the 999 emergency response systems for the country’s ambulance service. The open source CMS company Drupal also uses Server Density to monitor the servers powering its online community, and Algolia is another customer, using the SaaS to monitor their hosted search API.

He cites competitors as New Relic, which focuses on application performance rather than infrastructure, and Datadog. There are also numerous competitors that have been acquired, including Stack Driver (Google), Pingdom and Librato (SolarWinds), CopperEgg, and Boundary (BMC).

In a statement Mytton says: “I’m excited about this new round because it will allow us to invest in key areas while still maintaining the efficient, bootstrapped model that got us to where we are today. Raising money at this stage means we can continue our own style of running the business but with added resources to build an even better product.”