Announcing Our Series A

It’s Friday at about quitting time, and my plans for the evening involved a great cocktail, hanging out with friends, and maybe continuing to binge The Office. Sadly, there was a problem. Our alerting system detected an enormous and immediate spike in errors. The error description was along the lines of “table ‘servers’ does not exist” and thousands of customers couldn’t use a large cloud provider’s services. Customer support and engineering teams worked together for several hours to restore service to impacted customers. As one of many software engineers involved, I witnessed the incredible effort, coordination, and communication required to restore service. Known as The Great Table Drop™, this was a real incident that I largely attribute FireHydrant’s existence to.

That incident was over five years ago, but it stuck with me. There were several factors involved– there always are– but all helped me realize the need for FireHydrant and guide its development toward the product it is today. The reality is that complex systems management is incredibly difficult, which is why I’m beyond excited to announce that we’ve raised an $8mm Series A from Menlo Ventures and Work-Bench to simplify the management of complex systems for businesses everywhere.

For the past year and change, we’ve positioned ourselves as an incident management tool. However, after seeing over 50,000 hours of incidents, 20,000 runbook actions automated, and 10 million deploy events, we realized that incidents are consistently the result of a complex system. So starting today, FireHydrant is no longer an incident management tool — we’re a complex systems management tool.

This new funding will help drive our refined vision forward. We’re hiring exceptional talent, building exciting new features, and upgrading our existing product to enable teams with complex systems to operate more efficiently. We firmly believe that people are what solve complex problems, and we aim to be the tool that augments teams to be more effective in doing so.

Our solution today is based on our experience in the trenches as engineers, feedback from our customers, and incidents we’ve observed in the real world. We’ve seen a range of companies create bespoke solutions for creating incidents, tracking deploys, and graph service ownership. Most of these tools inevitably sit on a server never to be updated with mild adoption by the user. FireHydrant is the tool we wish we had ourselves, and this way of thinking will continue to drive our platform forever.

Over the next year, you can expect to see more integrations with alerting providers, ticketing tools and source control managers (to name a few). You’ll also see a refined user experience, much of which we’ve built off of feedback from our incredible customers.

I want to close while looking back at our humble beginnings. FireHydrant started as a video series on how to build an application in Ruby On Rails. I never would have expected to see it land where it is today. We’ve built such an incredible team over the last year, and having funding to continue that is such an incredible feeling, especially in these times. I’m personally elated that we get to continue helping even more customers in the coming years.

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