Behind the Investment: Lightrun’s Mission to Shift Observability Left

If you ask developers what their least favorite part of their job is, there is a high chance the answer is debugging. And what is worse, debugging in production. It can take hours to add more visibility and reproduce issues in local environments if your laptop can even handle the load. This repetitive and time- consuming process is not only frustrating, but also leads to longer downtime that directly impacts the company's overall bottom line. On top of that, developers lack the tools to get consistent code-level visibility into performance impact during the development phase so today it is very much an after the fact issue.

Enter Lightrun. Their product allows developers to resolve bugs faster by adding logs, metrics, and traces to production and staging code in real-time from within their existing IDE and workflow. The immediate value prop is in reducing time to solving production issues, hence developers can spend less time debugging and more time doing the fun stuff, building.

Observability is an extension of monitoring - think when there is an issue with application performance or run time, how do you get visibility into where the issue came from within the code base. Traditionally this has been handled by ops teams and developers were brought in after the fact to debug. While it is important for Ops teams to have a view into production issues and business impact, their observability tools focus on data from "the right" making it difficult for developers to translate into their own workflow. Lightrun works alongside both observability and APM tools to give developers a seamless experience.

Lightrun is not only giving developers better tools with code level visibility to debug these production issues line-by-line, but also allowing run time and other observability metrics to be considered in the development phase. Essentially, providing developers with total agility in extending the CI/CD process to continuous debugging and continuous observability. Our thesis here hinges on this idea that observability should and will shift left, similar to what has happened with testing and security, and Lightrun has the product to enable this.

We first met Lightrun's CEO, Ilan Peleg, about a year ago; he showed us their product demo and we were immediately sold on the value proposition. We continued to stay in close touch until they were ready to raise the Series A round. Since then they have onboarded customers like Taboola, Sisense (an Insight portfolio company), and Yotpo giving us further confidence in the opportunity and product validation.

We are really excited about the market dynamics, differentiated technology, and potential to build out a strong bottom up GTM with their new free tier Lightrun Cloud product. We are thrilled to partner with Ilan and the entire Lightrun team on the mission to shift observability left.

Grace Kotick Vice President More By The Author