Cybersecurity experts take a community-driven approach to solving problems. Security researchers share the vulnerabilities they discover with the broader cybersecurity community, so companies can patch security holes before something catastrophic happens.
Prequel is trying to bring the same approach to its software.
The startup is building a database of software failure patterns and misconfigurations in Linux workloads. The database is updated by a growing community of engineers and developers who exchange reliability information. Prequel's software resides within a company's existing software stack and pulls from this database, constantly checking for bugs and glitches.
The company's co-founders Tony Meehan and Lyndon Brown (pictured above, left to right) both have backgrounds in the security field. Both men worked for the National Security Agency and the cyber operations platform company Endgame.
Brown told TechCrunch that when a software failure occurs, engineers must collect endless data logs to identify the problem before they can begin mitigating it. For some software problems, only a few people in your company know enough about the program to help.
“We call former employees in past lives and say, 'I know you left the company, but no one really understands how this service works.' I've lived through situations where I had to say, 'Can you help us?''' Brown said. “We've had customers tell us about driving to someone's house in the middle of the night and knocking on the wrong door to ask for help.”
Brown and Meehan wondered why the same kind of system for sharing knowledge about security vulnerabilities doesn't exist for software bugs. Realizing that no one was making progress in this field, they decided to give it a try.
“If people have seen this problem before, they can actually make it a reality for themselves,” Meehan said. “It was like an anchoring point for us. We wanted to create a product that would liberate a community of people who had gone through known failures and open source software, much like we did in security 15 years ago. How do I build it?”
Prequel was launched in 2023 and has so far operated in stealth. The company says its technology has already been deployed by several Fortune 500 companies and has built a community network of up to 500 people.
Now, the company has come out of stealth and raised $3.3 million led by Work-Bench with participation from Runtime Ventures, Operator Partners, and a number of angel investors who understand the issue, including Elastic CTOs Shay Banon and Jon. announced a seed round. Mr. Oberheide is the former founder and CTO of Duo Security. The funding will be used for product development and expansion of the detection library.
Brown said Prequel's biggest competitors are data observability and monitoring products that also monitor software for potential failures and bugs. Companies in this space include Datadog and Splunk.
But Brown argues that an observability platform is only as good as the engineering talent that deploys it. Additionally, while all of these platforms only help companies deal with catastrophic failures after they occur, Prequel's approach provides a level of control where only a select few know how to solve the problem. People can start tackling problems early, before they reach . He added that unlike some of these companies, all data is stored with the customer, so it also doesn't charge customers for data transfer, only the subscription for the service itself.
But the team welcomes competition, Meehan said, who believes more players focusing on the field could be the tide that lifts all boats.
“Modern applications are full of failures, and the only things teams can really deal with are catastrophic failures or failures that are impacting customers,” Brown said. “What we're really excited about is that the team will be able to better handle and prioritize the large number of problems that exist.”