Today, Rookout, the data extraction and pipelining platform, announced it has raised $8 million in funding. The Series-A Round was led by Cisco Investments, who made a strategic investment alongside existing backers TLV Partners and Emerge. Additionally, industry leaders including Nat Friedman, CEO of GitHub, John Kodumal, CTO and Cofounder of LaunchDarkly, and Raymond Colletti, VP of Revenue at Codecov, added their support. Rookout will use the funding to continue its commercial growth while expanding its core offering to cover additional observability use cases and languages. Coinciding with this news, the company also announced a free tier option.
Rookout allows software engineers to set “non-breaking breakpoints” with a single click, collecting live code execution data on-the-fly, without stopping the code or requiring any redeployment. Rookout’s flexibility enables it to be used in the most modern infrastructures, including containerized code on Kubernetes clusters, as well as traditional legacy systems; it’s also the first and only solution for debugging the code of live serverless functions in production.
In the coming year, the company plans to add additional programming languages alongside its existing support for JVM-based languages like Java and Kotlin, as well as NodeJS and Python.
“The unique aspect of our technology is in the decoupling of data from code, which gives access to the app’s data layer without affecting the code layer,” commented Or Weis, co-founder and CEO of Rookout. “This new approach is changing both the way developers perceive their software and the way they interact with it. We started by highlighting relatively simple use cases for this capability, such as logging and debugging, but we’ve discovered in the past year that our customers have been finding completely new ways to use Rookout’s code-level data collection capabilities. We’re now focused on accommodating, supporting and enhancing the many varied uses of code-level observability and pipelining.”
Rookout has grown to a 20-person team and is building up its San Francisco Bay-Area office to complement the Tel Aviv-based R&D team. Rookout has acquired a strong base of paying corporate customers including top-tier software firms, as well as a fast-growing online “self-service” process. To bring the power of instant code-level observability to everyone, Rookout is also announcing the launch of a free-tier option.
“Developers have become key influencers of enterprise IT spend. By collecting data on-demand without re-deploying, Rookout created a Developer-centric software, which short-circuits complexities in the production debugging, increases Developer efficiency and reduces the friction which exist between IT Ops and Developers,” said Rob Salvagno, vice president of Cisco Global Corporate Development and Cisco Investments, the venture arm of Cisco. “We’re proud to be backing Rookout and look forward to the strategic opportunities our relationship opens up.”
