VictorOps, a Boulder, Colo.-based startup, has raised $ 1.58 million in seed funding from Foundry Group, Tango Investments and its three co-founders Todd Vernon, Bryce Ambraziunas and Dan Jones (pictured). The startup is building a software platform that can help operations teams handle system alerts and outages from any device.
This is a problem perhaps felt acutely in the web world, where infrastructure and software as a service providers are expected to deliver always-on service and downtime can have big repercussions. For example the Amazon outage on Christmas Eve knocked Netflix offline, causing all kinds of customer complaints. As web sites and services become more important so have the operations teams who are supposed to keep them up. Those teams are also dealing with a different type of infrastructure–sometimes owned by the ops team and sometimes managed by them in a cloud.
VictorOps, which is seeking software developers as well as software as a service companies to be alpha customers, is currently in stealth mode, so its hard to find specifics about the platform it plans to offer ops managers. But we know it’s mobile. The company sent the following information to me about the problem it wants to solve:
Until just recently, mobile devices did not provide enough functionality to enable team members to collaborate and contribute. Now, the same device can effectively be the alerting channel, the view into situational information flow and the point of interaction to allow participation.
So maybe VictorOps is the holy grail for the operations teams that let them handle a 3 AM page from their bed, using their phone or a tablet. Having heard the complaints of friends responsible for keeping sites up and running, if this software works, it could be awesome. It’s founding team certainly has the experience to pull this off. Its CEO Todd Vernon, was the co-founder and CEO at Raindance, the web conferencing company, as well as the founder and CEO of Lijit, a web-ad business. The other two founders both have founded other companies and operated web-based businesses where downtime cut into sales as well.
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