It's not uncommon for developers working at any size company to struggle to keep track of all the software development-related tasks and bugs they need to address. According to a 2024 survey by Dynatrace, 88% of technology leaders say that the complexity of their tech stack has increased in the past year, and that this increased complexity has made it harder to deliver satisfying customer experiences.
There are plenty of surveillance vendors offering their own products as a solution, but Hannes Lenke, CEO and co-founder of surveillance and monitoring company Checkly, argues that many are too expensive to use at scale and charge unreasonable extra fees for certain features, support and maintenance.
“Very few engineers have access to complete observability and monitoring tools, and many of these tools still operate in silos,” Lenke, who founded Checkly with Tim Nolet and Timo Utenuer in 2018, told TechCrunch. “Furthermore, legacy monitoring tools cost companies a lot of money, making cost reduction one of the main drivers for tool migration.”
Nolet created Checkly as a side project to help developers get signals about their app's performance and downtime, offering a subscription-based set of synthetic monitoring tools. Synthetic monitoring, also known as active or proactive monitoring, tests software by simulating how a user would use it, mimicking user behavior, and uses this data to evaluate performance metrics like response times and error rates.
Image credit: Checkly
Checkly's platform can monitor APIs in addition to software, running scheduled or continuous automated test scripts to detect potential issues. Users can define monitoring as code within their existing codebase, maintain version control, and leverage the “trace” feature to tie backend failures to alerts.
“Our goal is to help developers find and resolve issues 10 times faster,” says Lenke. “With a synthetic monitoring setup, we'll be the first to know when an issue occurs, so we can resolve it before it reaches our customers.”
Lenke sees competitors not only incumbents in the observability space like DataDog, Splunk and New Relic, but also Pingdom, Runscope and Catchpoint, but he says Checkly's business is very strong: The company has more than 1,000 paying customers, including 1Password, Vercel and Yext, and runs 32.5 million API and software checks every day.
That caught the attention of investors.
This week, Checkly announced it had raised $20 million in a Series B funding round led by Balderton Capital, with participation from Accel and CRV. This brings Checkly's total funding to $32.25 million, and the new funding will be used for product development, expanding Checkly's 35-person team based in Berlin, and opening a satellite office in New York.
“We're seeing accelerating customer demand for Checkly,” Lenke said, “and in response, we're looking to expand our go-to-market team and bring even more customers onto Checkly.”