Rookout, the Tel Aviv-based startup that describes itself as a “developer-first observability platform,” today announced that it has raised a $16 million Series B funding round led by Fort Ross Ventures. Existing investors TLV Partners, Emerge and Cisco Investments, as well as new investors LIAN Group, Mighty Capital and Binder & Partners, also participated in this round, which brings the company’s total funding to over $28 million.
The promise of Rookout is to give engineers more data about how their code runs in production. That, the company argues, sets it apart from more traditional monitoring tools that tend to focus more on the infrastructure and helping SREs do their job and not the live code and business logic that developers care about.
Image Credits: Rookout
“We’re trying to give developers ownership over production — because that’s what we care about,” Rookout CEO Liran Haimovitch told me. “At Rookout, with 20 engineers, I don’t care what they’re doing on their laptops. I honestly don’t care. I care about what their code is doing in production. I think every engineering leader out there is feeling the same. But traditionally, engineers didn’t have access to what’s going on in production, and you can’t really make people care about something if you’re keeping them away from it.”
The company’s live debugging features are at the core of its toolset, powered by its dynamic instrumentation capabilities that enable developers to set what the company calls “non-breaking breakpoints” to collect live data and debug their applications in production. But the tool also integrates data from tracing tools like OpenTracing and OpenTelemtry, as well as various other third-party logging services.
The company says its customer base now includes the likes of Amdocs, Cisco, Dynatrace, Jobvite, Santander Bank and UPS. Since its last funding round in 2019, Rookout saw its revenue increase by 20x.
“We’ve been impressed with Rookout’s execution of its groundbreaking solution, alongside the rapid trajectory of its growing customer base and significant expansion momentum within the enterprise,” said Sharin Fisher Dibrov, partner at Fort Ross Ventures. “We are coming to a third wave of observability tools which shifts everything further left, and we’re excited to support Rookout’s journey and backing [Rookout CEO] Shahar [Fogel], Liran, and the team as the category-defining leader in developer-first observability.”
