OverOps scores $30 million led by Lightspeed Ventures

OverOps, a startup that wants to help companies find software bugs more efficiently than by pouring over log files, announced a $30 million Series C round led by Lightspeed Ventures, with participation from Menlo Ventures. Both are existing investors.

In a nutshell, OverOps delivers a cloud or on-prem solution that helps developers and operations teams nail down bugs in a more automated fashion, according to company co-founder and CEO Tal Weiss.

“Everyone is trying to release software more quickly and be more agile, be more efficient. The challenge to digital transformation is that the faster you go, the faster things break. The second any code breaks in staging or production, [our solution is] able to pinpoint the right developer and provide what they need to resolve that issue,” he explained.

Instead of parsing text and indexing application logs, Weiss says his company can dynamically index actual code in staging or production and analyze it down to a microscopic machine code level. He says there is a lot of machine learning to achieve this level of understanding going on in the background, but essentially it gives them the ability to know what’s normal and when something is outside of the normal state and requires attention.

Photo: OverOps

At that point, the company can send the information automatically in the form of a Jira ticket, a bot message in Slack or a notification from PagerDuty (or however the company chooses to receive these messages) and the developer can get to the heart of the problem quickly without having to hunt and peck for it.

If it works as described, that’s a powerful alternative to putting your software out in the world, finding a piece doesn’t work, hearing about it from your customers and then searching through log files to find the issue.

The company certainly has caught the attention of investors, who doubled their previous round of $15 million, which was delivered just last April. It could be because the company is experiencing tremendous growth right now, with 500 percent year-over-year growth over the last 12 months.

While you might see some overlap with application performance management tools from companies like New Relic and AppDynamics (which got acquired by Cisco earlier this year just before their IPO), Weiss says they tend to work in parallel with these tools. He sees his real competition as the legacy log file and search tool.

OverOps launched in 2012, but it took several years to build the product. Today it has more than 250 customers, including Nielsen, Intuit and Comcast, among others. The company hopes to keep the current momentum going by targeting larger enterprise customers that are struggling with containerization and micro services and finding ways to deliver applications ever more quickly.