A young startup is trying to help companies reduce cloud costs by writing “more efficient” code. And the company has secured $6.8 million in new funding from notable backers including Alphabet's GV, Spark Capital, and Lightspeed.
The company, called Polar Signals, launched a $4 million seed round from GV and Lightspeed in 2021 and has now closed its roundout with $10.8 million.
Here are the problems Polar Signals is trying to solve: Applications consume system resources such as CPU and memory. The more resources an application consumes, the more a company's cloud bill will increase. This is because large platform providers charge on a pay-as-you-go basis. One area that impacts resource consumption is the code itself. Therefore, the more structured your code is, with fewer lines and redundant operations, the more efficient it will run. And the higher the execution efficiency, the lower the cloud cost should theoretically be.
“Continuous profiling”
This is where “continuous profiling” comes into play. This is a concept that forms part of a broader software monitoring discipline known as 'observability', which aims to measure the internal state of a system to optimize performance. Continuous profiling was highlighted in his 2010 Google research paper, “Profiling across Google: A continuous profiling infrastructure for data centers.”
The core of continuous profiling is to monitor resource consumption up to a specific line number in a specific codebase and identify bottlenecks that may be causing excessive resource consumption.
An infrastructure-wide view of Polar Signals' CPU samples. Image credit: Polar Signals
Polar Signals is the lead developer of Parca, a continuous profiling open source project that systematically tracks CPU and memory usage and profiles the data queried over time. Parca is the core of Polar Signals, on which the company builds its commercial services. This includes Polar Signals Cloud, a recently released hosted service that eliminates setup and management hassles and introduces the usual features that ship with most enterprise SaaS tools, such as single sign-on . (SSO), team provisioning, and permission management.
“Our mission is to make data centers around the world 10 times more efficient than they are today,” Polar Signals founder and CEO Frederic Branczyk told TechCrunch.
In addition to today's funding news, the company is also introducing AI-powered suggestions to improve its code. Users select a section, tap Optimize with AI, and see suggested fixes. It will be available through an early access program starting today.
Polar Signals: AI-powered code suggestions. Image credit: Polar Signals
While cost savings is one of the main benefits promised by Polar Signals, the technology has other benefits as well. For example, Polar Signals provides insight into the impact of an attack and allows you to identify which parts, such as incident response efforts regarding DDoS attacks. The system is under stress.
“[The number one problem we solve] Helps organizations understand and improve resource bottlenecks. But what we've learned is that the strongest motivations tend to be different than what we originally thought,” Brancic said. “We initially thought cost savings would be the strongest motivator, but what we found was that: [companies are also using it for] Responses to incidents (e.g., “Why did I experience this delay or CPU spike?”) can be answered down to the line number of the source code, which becomes a much more powerful motivator. ”
The story so far
Founder and CEO Frederic Branczyk (fourth from the right) with colleagues from Polar Signals. Image credit: Polar Signals
Polar Signals was founded in 2020 by Branczyk, a former Red Hat engineer and leading figure in the Prometheus and Kubernetes ecosystems. That experience positions Polar Signals to target the enterprise cloud segment.
Since officially launching commercially in October, the company has acquired more than a dozen paying customers, including Vercel, Materize, Canonical, and Weaviate. This will help the new capital injection double towards further growth. It is likely to scale in the coming months and years.
“Our pipeline is too big to even close.” [new customers] That is also why we are planning to significantly grow our team in this direction,” Brunchik said.
As of this writing, Polar Signals claims 11 employees have experience at companies such as AWS, Meta, Red Hat, and HashiCorp. Although the company is incorporated in the United States, it only has two employees based there. The majority of employees are employed through a subsidiary in Germany, where Bruncic himself is based, and through remote.com, a global HR company in Spain. England, Poland, India.
In addition to lead investors Spark Capital, GV, and Lightspeed, the company's latest capital infusion also includes a series of institutional and angel investors, including Haystack, Lorimer, and Guillermo Rauch, CEO of Polar Signals customer Vercel. It included investment from the family.