StackPulse CEO Ofer Smadari. (StackPulse Photo)

As companies rely more heavily on cloud-based services, software outages can be much more painful and detrimental.

StackPulse wants to help. The Portland, Ore.-based startup came out of stealth mode today and announced a $20 million Series A round led by GGV Ventures, which follows a $8 million seed round raised from Bessemer Venture Partners last year.

The company describes its technology as “incident response automation,” helping customers streamline how they manage reliability and respond to events across various apps and services. Incidents covered by StackPulse range from minor performance issues to full outages when services are inaccessible.

“When something goes wrong with running software, most organizations rely on a collection of custom scripts built in-house, including IT tools first created decades ago, chat tools used for general purpose communication, and a lot of manual work to tie information together across these tools,” said StackPulse CEO Ofer Smadari. “That’s a lot of friction, a lot of opportunities for miscommunication, a lot of ways to not learn from past incidents.”

Smadari helped launch StackPulse last year with Leonid Belkind and Eldad Livni. The trio previously co-founded Luminate Security, which was acquired by Symantec in 2019. Other employees hail from companies such as Puppet and Twistlock.

Smadari said the pandemic has helped drive business for StackPulse. Addressing outages while working remotely can prove challenging.

“StackPulse makes it easy for developers and DevOps teams to standardize incident response and share best practices as executable code,” he noted.

Recent outages suffered by Slack and Google show the need for something like StackPulse, Smadari said.

StackPulse has 35 employees and plans to triple headcount this year. Glenn Solomon at GGV and Amit Karp at Bessemer will join the StackPulse board as a result of the fresh funding.

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